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From a photograph by Pach 

WILLIAM JAMES 



MEMORIES AND 
MILESTONES 



BY 

JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



NEW YORK 

MOFFAT, YARD AND COMPANY 

1915 



?S 



4- 






<T 



Copyright, 191 5, by 
JOHN JAY CHAPMAN 



All rights reserved 




MAR -5 1915 

©CI.A397231 
1U, 



PREFACE 

Life is a unity in spite of the lightning 
changes of scene that flash across its vistas, 
and shock us with an awe inspiring sense 
of dislocation. Behind all there is a steady, 
moving power; and the scenes are related. 
The whole of any life, — the whole of any 
epoch, — is past and gone in a moment; 
and, behold, it then appears to be stamped 
all over with a kind of identity: it is un- 
mistakably one thing. But we cannot peep 
behind this curtain of the future and find 
out what all our present thoughts signify. 
Therefore anyone who publishes portraits 
and memories, or who reprints little ad- 
dresses upon current history, will do well to 
refrain from any parade of philosophy in a 
preface. One of the deepest impulses in 
man is the impulse to record, — to scratch 
a drawing on a tusk or keep a diary, to col- 
lect sagas and heap cairns. This instinct 
as to the enduring value of the past is, one 
might say, the very basis of civilization. 
It is a good sign then when young men 



PREFACE 

keep journals and old gentlemen take to 
publishing reminiscences. It helps the gen- 
eral atmosphere of thought and enriches 
everyone a little. A belief in this kind of 
literary conservation must be my excuse 
for publishing the ensuing volume. 



VI 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 



I Art and Art Schools ... 3 

II William James 19 

III Shaw and the Modern Drama 31 

IV Dr. Horace Howard Furness . 45 
V Henry Grafton Chapman . 61 

VI The Function of the Church 

School 71 

VII Mr. Brimmer 87 

VIII Mrs. Whitman 103 

IX Greek as a Pleasure . . .115 

X Charles Eliot Norton . .129 

XI Ethical Culture .... 149 

XII President Eliot . . . .165 

XIII Notes on the Teaching of 

Art 193 

XIV Maria Weston Chapman . . 209 
XV Coatesville 225 

XVI Julia Ward Howe .... 235 

XVII The Negro Question . . . 249 

XVIII Alfred Q. Collins .... 259 

vii 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

William James Frontispiece [/ 



FACING 
PAGE 



Horace Howard Furness . . . . .46^' 

Charles Eliot Norton 130 */ 

Julia Ward Howe 236 ^/ 



IX 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

Address delivered at New Haven on the Forty- 
eighth Anniversary of the Yale School of Fine 
Arts, June 8, 1914. 



MEMORIES AND 
MILESTONES 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

The Nineteenth Century has prided itself 
on its critical philosophies. To understand 
past history has been the peculiar mission of 
that century. It expounded Greek and me- 
dieval religion ; it elaborated theories ; it put 
everything into books. The things it chief- 
ly valued were its own valuations of the 
past. The investigator became the Cory- 
phaeus of the age, and anyone who could 
propound a new and brilliant critical the- 
ory was thought a prophet. The intellec- 
tual leaders of other ages have been artists 
and saints, but in the nineteenth century the 
leaders of thought have been professors. 

We are familiar with this condition of 

things; we are accustomed to the bondage 

of doctrine, and we almost forget that the 

natural language of humanity is art, and 

3 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

that every literature of criticism turns very 
rapidly with the revolving suns into a litera- 
ture of old opinion. There is not room in 
the world's ever-active and seething brain 
for old opinions ; and we may therefore ex- 
pect that the thought of the nineteenth cen- 
tury will show as a blank in history. Ideas 
endure only when they are so stated that 
they carry a new message to each genera- 
tion ; and they do this only when their mes- 
sage is clad in the form of art. 

When the men of the Renaissance wrote 
their commentary upon Greek art, they 
wrote it in marble. That is why we read 
it to-day. When Walter Scott and Victor 
Hugo issued treatises upon the past they ex- 
pressed themselves in forms of living, self- 
sustaining literature. The artist speaks 
always from the present. 

There is a great illusion, — it is the illu- 
sion of the nineteenth century, — namely, 
that a book endures, and that everything 
must therefore be packed into books. We 
have wished to record everything in prose. 
Painting, poetry, religion, history; passion, 
thought, myth, humor; — our foolish age 
has believed that it was writing all these 
things up into linear and enduring prose. 
Never before was there an epoch stupid 
4 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

enough to set out upon such an undertak- 
ing. The eighteenth century, for all its 
encyclopaedias, put the arts first, and kept 
Academies only as convenient depositories 
for philosophic apparatus. The Academy 
furnished a house for the telescope, a cata- 
logue for the picture gallery. But Art still 
ruled in the imagination of the times. As 
a consequence of this, all eighteenth-cen- 
tury art is interesting. But a large part 
of the art of the nineteenth century lacks 
resonance and is equivocal, because it has 
been made by men whose belief in their own 
vehicle was on the wane. Half their brain 
has lived in contemporary philosophy, 
namely in that atmosphere of nineteenth- 
century thought which puts the critic above 
the artist, and crows like a cock over the 
remains of the Parthenon. It was criti- 
cism that killed art during the nineteenth 
century. Goethe felt this coming on when 
he said that he never could have written 
his early works if, at the time he wrote 
them, there had existed such an atmosphere 
of carping criticism as reigned in Germany 
during his later years. The worship of the 
work of non-creative minds, — the general 
public belief that great things were being 
found out, and that hard work was cultiva- 
5 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

tion, has led men to forget that at the bot- 
tom of the world's interest in all of the fine 
arts lie mysteries which are the source of 
their power. We are united to the past by- 
mysteries, which a critical zeal tends to 
destroy. The critics of painting have pal- 
sied their own relation to art by their con- 
scientious work over it. The great illusion 
that man can seize and hold the truth is 
what has injured art in the nineteenth cen- 
tury. This thought makes the vision of the 
painter rigid, turns the poet into a preacher, 
and sets the playwright and novelist to work 
at social problems. It makes the intellec- 
tual life a treadmill. 

The nineteenth century was an era that 
had to be passed through. It rescued from 
oblivion the innumerable neglected master- 
pieces of other ages, and it has left the mu- 
seums, and the critical Journals in its wake. 
But it has also fastened certain bad habits 
of thought upon the world. 

Oh, let us never say anything critical 
again, never analyze a picture, or a play, 
never say something intelligent about an 
epoch of the past. For this pettifogging, 
ignorant nosing over the fine arts is what 
has all but extinguished them in west- 
Europe. It is noticeable that each of us 
6 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

has the disease most acutely in regard to 
some art with which he is least familiar. I 
observe, for instance, that if I read a book, 
I may perhaps say little about it, because I 
am bookish. But if I go to a gallery of re- 
cent paintings, — entering thus into a field 
of which I am perfectly ignorant (I could 
not draw the portrait of a cat or model a 
potato), why a whole ready-made avalanche 
of clever criticism pours from me upon the 
canvases. This is the destruction of art, 
this talking about it by people who do not 
practice it. 

Let our opinions on art be written in 
paint, and our theories of poetry exhibited 
in poems having the flesh and body of poetic 
life. No other criticisms will stand, except 
those which are done into living art, and 
are thus, as it were, a part of life itself. 

As crystals form of themselves in a chem- 
ical mixture when the temperature permits, 
so talent appears in the world. No one 
knows what the conditions are that gener- 
ate talent. Art is a mystery, and springs 
up out of the shadows, like a mushroom. 
An artist is a man who has had the good 
fortune to receive sufficient instruction at 
one time, and to be sufficiently left to him- 
7 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

self at another. Severe training and utter 
neglect, — he must have had both. Depth 
of feeling, accuracy of intellect, experience 
in the vehicle, — all these things go together, 
and there is no royal road to them. And 
behind them there is the force that somehow 
works its will and releases a new personality 
into the world. So far as intelligence can 
discern, a general popular interest in some 
form of art precedes the rise of artists. 
The child of promise must be born near to 
some master who can teach him the rudi- 
ments. A village priest teaches him the be- 
ginnings of harmony, and the nearest man 
of means pays for sending him to the con- 
servatory. There must exist a social con- 
spiracy of assistance, which awaits his com- 
ing. Some amateurs have, perhaps, be- 
come interested in reviving mural decora- 
tion or church music, and have set up a 
school which catches the young tadpoles 
of genius in a net and finds a pond for them. 
Let me give an instance. A church in 
our village found itself in need of an organ- 
ist. A boy of twenty musically gifted of- 
fered himself for employment. The prob- 
lem was how to fit him for the position. He 
was about to take correspondence lessons 
in harmony from a teacher whose adver- 
8 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

tisement he had seen in a magazine, when 
it was discovered that Trinity Church in 
New York had recently founded a school 
for organists, where counterpoint was 
taught, and every classic tradition of church 
music was preserved. The boy is now 
earning his living as assistant choir master 
in a New York church, while he takes the 
course at the Trinity School which will 
make him a competent organist. Ten years 
ago this could not have been done. Our 
community had not advanced far enough 
to recognize, save, and protect the early 
shoots of musical talent. 

A good teacher is like a jailer, with this 
difference, that his aim is, not to keep per- 
sons in, but to let them out of prison. The 
students are constantly fastening the bolts 
and pulling down the shutters upon them- 
selves, while the master endeavors to show 
them how to avoid doing so. His task is a 
religious one and is as difficult as theology. 
For he must remain untrammeled while 
dealing in dogmas. It is all personal work. 
There is no art in the abstract. 

The problem of society is to let the newly 

forming crystals of talent come easily into 

contact with each other. This was done 

through the studio of the master down to 

9 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Louis XIV's time, when the state began 
to take charge of everything. It would not 
be surprising if humanity should return to 
the old studio system in case a new age of 
art should come in. The institutional sys- 
tem may be found too clumsy a teacher to 
deal with the higher branches of art. But 
on the other hand, personal genius is so in- 
woven with all advance in the fine arts that 
we cannot dogmatize about ways and means. 
We know that in the life of the artist pov- 
erty, obscurity, and loneliness are often not 
disadvantages but advantages; and early 
wealth, a conventional education, and so- 
licitous parents are often not advantages, 
but disadvantages, which only time and pe- 
culiar force can overcome. 

In the United States we have been wad- 
ing our way towards the higher learning 
through the higher buildings. If you heard 
of a singing school in Pittsburg it meant a 
half-million dollars' worth of bricks and 
mortar. When the New York Amateurs 
of the Drama founded a National School 
of Acting, they sank two millions of dollars 
in an auditorium, — and sold it the next 
year because the age had provided neither 
plays, audiences, nor actors. What these 
gentlemen truly needed was a few good 
10 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

teachers and a hired room, with no pub- 
licity. 

O keep this Yale School of Art a secret. 
Let the great public first become aware of 
its existence by finding a man who can 
paint, and asking him, Where did you 
learn? 

During the last fifteen years education 
has made great strides in America. We 
have made great strides in humility. We 
have come to see that our education is rudi- 
mentary and imperfect, that time is re- 
quired in order that our standards may be 
raised. As our familiarity with intellect 
increases we shall unconsciously and inev- 
itably subserve its laws. As our uncon- 
scious familiarity with the ways of intel- 
lect increases, a general consent will be 
reached without discussion as to many mat- 
ters which we now regard as problems and 
paradoxes. During the next fifty years we 
shall discover that the best thing we can do 
for the average mind is to give exceptional 
advantages to the exceptional mind. There 
is a law of nature at the back of this the- 
ory, — the law, namely, which Christ re- 
ferred to in saying that to him that hath 
shall be given. In America our philosophy 
of education has often kicked against this 
ii 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

law, pretending that in America we had 
found something better. But in the end we 
shall conform to the law because it is the 
truth. 

I do not desire to become dogmatic in 
dealing with so mystical a question as this 
question of teaching. The truth floats and 
beckons ; we must be content with half-light 
and intimations. Education always hovers 
between two tendencies: the tendency to 
teach to every pupil a little of something, 
and the tendency to provide great and rare 
opportunities for great and rare talents. 
Primary education is governed by the first 
tendency, the higher education by the sec- 
ond. In America our higher education 
seems to have been too much colored by 
ways of feeling proper to the elementary 
school. 

The higher branches of learning are slow 
in their effect upon the community. They 
imply time. If you assist a single first-rate 
mind to develop fully, that mind will do 
more for the next age than ten thousand 
second-rate talents, each of which you 
should assist a little. That mind can be 
counted on to educate and inspire its own 
contemporaries. Thus, in a generation you 
will have reached everyone. We must be 

12 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

willing to operate down the stream of time. 
We cannot hope to color all the water of 
the river as it flows by us ; but we can cast 
something into the stream which will color 
it down below. 

At Yale you are engaged in working. 
Your School is one among many of those 
little groups of sincere men who are form- 
ing centers of thought, centers of mu- 
sic, centers of painting in America. These 
groups already qualify the age. Our whole 
conception of America is affected by the 
mere thought of them. There is, for in- 
stance, a music school in New York City 
which is working away unostentatiously 
and with the modesty of a European school. 
It might be in Belgium or in Germany. 
We all have a relation to these groups of 
craftsmen. They educate us into a respect 
for the artist. They thus weave us into 
fabric of the whole coordinate mind of hu- 
manity. It is only through such men that 
our country will ultimately come into a true 
relation with European art and music; for 
until we have art and music of our own our 
relation to the arts of Europe must be false 
and flimsy. The aid which you or I, — I 
mean the amateurs, — can offer to these 
groups of men is invisible and yet enormous. 
13 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

It is the assistance which we give to men 
when we honor them. 

It would seem as if America's great need 
of social cohesion had, for a century, ab- 
sorbed the energies of our own people, so 
that we can only think in communal terms. 
All ideas must be justified by an appeal to 
public spirit: they must be passed by the 
censor. In America our path towards Art 
lies through Benevolence. The country 
now heaves and glows with benevolence 
and with social movements. If you 
hold up any one of these movements 
and search it for intellect you will find very 
little. You will find crude ideas, defective 
education, apparent shallowness and a lack 
of intellectual rigor. And yet all this haze 
of benevolence is the bed and cradle of in- 
tellect, the soil in which intellect will spring 
up later. Peter Cooper and his wife had 
no knowledge of the arts and crafts, but 
only a firm faith in the reality of them, and 
a hovering love for the young people to 
whom they hoped to throw open new ave- 
nues of life. And yet to-day the Cooper 
Union is one of the best schools of crafts- 
manship in America, a place worthy to be 
visited by the experts of the old world. 

There is some great law of progress at 
the back of our present devotion to moral 
14 



ART AND ART SCHOOLS 

causes. Our causes, it may be observed, 
are themselves becoming more abstract in 
nature. They are no longer Anti-slavery, 
Civil Service Reform, Ballot Reform, Tem- 
perance (though I confess that Woman's 
Rights still continues). Our present causes 
are merging into a desire for social service 
and for the moral and physical improve- 
ment of everyone. The reformer of to- 
day wants to uplift other people and make 
them better. He often rushes out to do 
this before he knows what he would do. 
At first sight this condition of things would 
seem to give no scope for the pursuit of 
truth for its own sake. It would seem that 
we seek truth in order that we may use it 
for somebody's benefit. That subtler, 
deeper, stronger, more pervading and en- 
during influence which the artist has upon 
the world merely from the fact of his ex- 
istence is all but unknown to our current 
philosophy. Yet it is this very truth which 
we are destined to discover in our progress 
through benevolence toward intellect. 

Our ideas of utility are crude, and much 
that older countries take for granted we 
must come upon and learn freshly for our- 
selves. The great artist is the most edu- 
cative influence upon the globe. But he 
15 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

must not and he will not care for educating 
or for uplifting other people. He cares for 
truth, and leaves that to do the work. So 
of the lesser artists, I am in sympathy with 
them when they neglect the current philoso- 
phies of benevolence and stick to their 
crafts. I verily believe that the atmosphere 
of benevolence in America will not be di- 
minished but increased as the world of in- 
tellect appears above the face of the waters. 
I verily believe that the artists among us 
will come to be considered, as artists have 
ever been considered elsewhere, as the ad- 
vance guards of Civilization. 



16 



WILLIAM JAMES 



II 

WILLIAM JAMES 

None of us will ever see a man like Wil- 
liam James again: there is no doubt about 
that. And yet it is hard to state what it 
was in him that gave him either his charm 
or his power, what it was that penetrated 
and influenced us, what it is that we lack 
and feel the need of, now that he has so un- 
expectedly and incredibly died. I always 
thought that William James would continue 
forever; and I relied upon his sanctity as if 
it were sunlight. 

I should not have been abashed at being 
discovered in some mean action by William 
James; because I should have felt that he 
would understand and make allowances. 
The abstract and sublime quality of his na- 
ture was always enough for two; and I 
confess to having always trespassed upon 
him and treated him with impertinence, 
without gloves, without reserve, without or- 
dinary, decent concern for the sentiments 
19 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

and weaknesses of human character. 
Knowing nothing about philosophy, and 
having the dimmest notions as to what 
James's books might contain, I used occa- 
sionally to write and speak to him about his 
specialties in a tone of fierce contempt; and 
never failed to elicit from him in reply 
the most spontaneous and celestial gayety. 
Certainly he was a wonderful man. 

He was so devoid of selfish aim or small 
personal feeling that your shafts might 
pierce, but could never wound him. You 
could not " diminish one dowle that's in his 
plume." Where he walked, nothing could 
touch him; and he enjoyed the Emersonian 
immunity of remaining triumphant even 
after he had been vanquished. The reason 
was, as it seems to me, that what the man 
really meant was always something inde- 
structible and persistent; and that he knew 
this inwardly. He had not the gift of ex- 
pression, but rather the gift of suggestion. 
He said things which meant one thing to 
him and something else to the reader or 
listener. His mind was never quite in fo- 
cus, and there was always something left 
over after each discharge of the battery, 
something which now became the beginning 
of a new thought. When he found out his 
20 



WILLIAM JAMES 

mistake or defect of expression, when he 
came to see that he had not said quite what 
he meant, he was the first to proclaim it, 
and to move on to a new position, a new 
misstatement of the same truth, — a new, 
debonair apperception, clothed in non- 
conclusive and suggestive figures of speech. 

How many men have put their shoulders 
out of joint in striking at the phantasms 
which James projected upon the air ! James 
was always in the right, because what he 
meant was true. The only article of his 
which I ever read with proper attention was 
" The Will to Believe,'' a thing that exas- 
perated me greatly until I began to see, or 
to think I saw, what James meant, and at 
the same time to acknowledge to myself 
that he had said something quite different. 
I hazard this idea about James as one might 
hazard an idea about astronomy, fully 
aware that it may be very foolish. 

In private life and conversation there 
was the same radiation of thought about 
him. The center and focus of his thought 
fell within his nature, but not within his 
intellect. You were thus played upon by 
a logic which was not the logic of intellect, 
but a far deeper thing, limpid and clear in 
itself, confused and refractory only when 
21 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

you tried to deal with it intellectually. You 
must take any fragment of such a man by 
itself, for his whole meaning is in the frag- 
ment. If you try to piece the bits together, 
you will endanger their meaning. In gen- 
eral talk on life, literature, and politics 
James was always throwing off sparks that 
were cognate only in this, that they came 
from the same central fire in him. It was 
easy to differ from him; it was easy to go 
home thinking that James had talked the 
most arrant rubbish, and that no educated 
man had a right to be so ignorant of the 
first principles of thought and of the foun- 
dations of human society. Yet it was im- 
possible not to be morally elevated by the 
smallest contact with William James. A 
refining, purgatorial influence came out of 
him. 

I believe that in his youth, James dedi- 
cated himself to the glory of God and the 
advancement of Truth, in the same spirit 
that a young knight goes to seek the Grail, 
or a young military hero dreams of laying 
down his life for his country. What his 
early leanings towards philosophy or his 
natural talent for it may have been, I do 
not know; but I feel as if he had first taken 
up philosophy out of a sense of duty, — 



WILLIAM JAMES 

the old Puritanical impulse, — in his case 
illumined, however, with a humor and gen- 
ius not at all of the Puritan type. He 
adopted philosophy as his lance and buck- 
ler, — psychology, it was called in his day, 
— and it proved to be as good as the next 
thing, — as pliable as poetry or fiction or 
politics or law would have been, — or any- 
thing else that he might have adopted as a 
vehicle through which his nature could work 
upon society. 

He, himself, was all perfected from the 
beginning, a selfless angel. It is this qual- 
ity of angelic unselfishness which gives the 
power to his work. There may be some 
branches of human study — mechanics per- 
haps — where the personal spirit of the in- 
vestigator does not affect the result; but 
philosophy is not one of them. Philosophy 
is a personal vehicle ; and every man makes 
his own, and through it he says what he has 
to say. It is all personal: it is all human: 
it is all non-reducible to science, and incapa- 
ble of being either repeated or continued by 
another man. 

Now James was an illuminating ray, a 

dissolvent force. He looked freshly at life, 

and read books freshly. What he had to 

say about them was not entirely articulated, 

23 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

but was always spontaneous. He seemed 
to me to have too high an opinion of every- 
thing. The last book he had read was al- 
ways " a great book " ; the last person he 
had talked with, a wonderful being. If I 
may judge from my own standpoint, I 
should say that James saw too much good 
in everything, and felt towards everything 
a too indiscriminating approval. He was 
always classing things up into places they 
didn't belong and couldn't remain in. 

Of course, we know that Criticism is 
proverbially an odious thing; it seems to 
deal only in shadows, — it acknowledges 
only varying shades of badness in every- 
thing. And we know, too, that Truth is 
light ; Truth cannot be expressed in shadow, 
except by some subtle art which proclaims 
the shadow-part to be the lie, and the non- 
expressed part to be the truth. And it is 
easy to look upon the whole realm of Crit- 
icism and see in it nothing but a science 
which concerns itself with the accurate 
statement of lies. Such, in effect, it is in 
the hands of most of its adepts. Now 
James's weakness as a critic was somehow 
connected with the peculiar nature of his 
mind, which lived in a consciousness of 
light. The fact is that James was non-crit- 
24 



WILLIAM JAMES 

ical,.and therefore divine. He was forever 
hovering, and never could alight; and this 
is a quality of truth and a quality of genius. 

The great religious impulse at the back 
of all his work, and which pierces through 
at every point, never became expressed in 
conclusive literary form, or in dogmatic ut- 
terance. It never became formulated in 
his own mind into a stateable belief. And 
yet it controlled his whole life and mind, 
and accomplished a great work in the world. 
The spirit of a priest was in him, — in his 
books and in his private conversation. He 
was a sage, and a holy man ; and everybody 
put off his shoes before him. And yet in 
spite of this, — in conjunction with this, he 
was a sportive, wayward, Gothic sort of 
spirit, who was apt, on meeting a friend, 
to burst into foolery, and whose wit was al- 
ways three parts poetry. Indeed his humor 
was as penetrating as his seriousness. Both 
of these two sides of James's nature — the 
side that made a direct religious appeal, and 
the side that made a veiled religious appeal 
— became rapidly intensified during his lat- 
ter years ; so that, had the process continued 
much longer, the mere sight of him must 
have moved beholders to amend their lives. 

I happened to be at Oxford at one of his 
25 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

lectures in 1908; and it was remarkable to 
see the reverence which that very un-re- 
vering class of men — the University dons 
— evinced towards James, largely on ac- 
count of his appearance and personality. 
The fame of, him went abroad, and the San- 
hedrim attended. A quite distinguished, 
and very fussy scholar, a member of the old 
guard of Nil-admirari Cultivation, — who 
would have sniffed nervously if he had met 
Moses — told me that he had gone to a lec- 
ture of James's, " though the place was so 
crowded, and stank so that he had to come 
away immediately." — " But," he added, 
" he certainly has the face of a sage." 

There was, in spite of his playfulness, a 
deep sadness about James. You felt that he 
had just stepped out of this sadness in order 
to meet you, and was to go back into it the 
moment you left him. It may be that sad- 
ness inheres in some kinds of profoundly 
religious characters, — in dedicated persons 
who have renounced all, and are constantly 
hoping, thinking, acting, and (in the typ- 
ical case) praying for humanity. Lincoln 
was sad, and Tolstoi was sad, and many 
sensitive people, who view the world as it 
is, and desire nothing for themselves except 
to become of use to others, and to become 
26 



WILLIAM JAMES 

agents in the spread of truth and happiness, 
— such people are often sad. It has some- 
times crossed my mind that James wanted 
to be a poet and an artist, and that there lay 
in him, beneath the ocean of metaphysics, 
a lost Atlantis of the fine arts ; that he really 
hated philosophy and all its works, and pur- 
sued them only as Hercules might spin, or 
as a prince in a fairy tale might sort seeds 
for an evil dragon, or as anyone might pa- 
tiently do some careful work for which he 
had no aptitude. It would seem most nat- 
ural, if this were the case between James 
and the metaphysical sciences; for what is 
there in these studies that can drench and 
satisfy a tingling mercurial being who loves 
to live on the surface, as well as in the 
depths of life? Thus we reason, forget- 
ting that the mysteries of temperament are 
deeper than the mysteries of occupation. If 
James had had the career of Moliere, he 
would still have been sad. He was a vic- 
tim of divine visitation: the Searching 
Spirit would have winnowed him in the 
same manner, no matter what avocation he 
might have followed. 

The world watched James as he pur- 
sued through life his search for religious 
truth; the world watched him, and often 
27 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

gently laughed at him, asking, " When will 
James arise and fly ? When will * he take 
the wings of the morning, and dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the sea ' ? " And in the 
meantime, James was there already. Those 
were the very places that he was living in. 
Through all the difficulties of polyglot met- 
aphysics and of modern psychology he 
waded for years, lecturing and writing and 
existing, — and creating for himself a pub- 
lic which came to see in him only the saint 
and the sage, which felt only the religious 
truth which James was in search of, yet 
could never quite grasp in his hand. This 
very truth constantly shone out through 
him, — shone, as it were, straight through 
his waistcoat, — and distributed itself to 
everyone in the drawing-room, or in the lec- 
ture-hall where he sat. Here was the fa- 
miliar paradox, the old parable, the psycho- 
logical puzzle of the world. " But what 
went ye out for to see ? " In the very mo- 
ment that the world is deciding that a man 
was no prophet and had nothing to say, in 
that very moment perhaps is his work per- 
fected, and he himself is gathered to his 
fathers, after having been a lamp to his 
own generation, and an inspiration to those 
who come after. 

28 



SHAW AND THE MODERN 
DRAMA 



Ill 

SHAW AND THE MODERN DRAMA 

"Fanny's First Play," by George Ber- 
nard Shaw, has the first requisite of a play 
in that it is very entertaining — " divert- 
ing " would be the old-fashioned word. It is 
a lively, and even boisterous, burlesque, and 
would be a perfect sample of good burlesque 
writing if the humor of it were always good 
humor, and if some sort of ethical purpose 
were not from time to time rubbed in. 

The theme of the play is happy. The 
hero and heroine are the commonplace off- 
spring of middle-class British tradesmen; 
their fathers have been partners in business 
for years, and their betrothal, which has 
taken place before the play opens, is but a 
part of the humdrum world in which their 
lives are to be spent. An interruption to 
the idyll takes place, owing to the following 
circumstances: The hero, through a fight 
with a policeman, has got himself locked up 
for a fortnight; the heroine, in a fit of high 
3i 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

spirits, has gone alone to a dance-hall, and 
has there become involved in a " raid " of 
the place. Thus the heroine has also been 
incarcerated for the same two weeks as the 
hero. The discovery of these two esca- 
pades throws both families into convulsions 
of horror; and each of the four parents of 
the lovers exhibits a different and amusing 
variety of wounded conservatism. 

The nature of the hero's escapade has not 
been innocent, and it brings into the play a 
young woman of the streets in whose com- 
pany he has been arrested. The heroine's 
escapade has been innocent, but brings into 
the play a Frenchman in whose company 
she has been arrested and whose appearance 
gives rise to infinite equivocation and innu- 
endo. Both Frenchman and street lady are 
as entertaining as they can be, and every 
part in the play, as it is given at the Com- 
edy Theater, New York, is played to per- 
fection — including the one remaining char- 
acter of a young butler, who turns out in 
the end to be the brother of a duke. This 
butler, by the way, is finally married off to 
the heroine — after not quite sufficient 
preparation of the audience for such a 
denoument. 

Nothing could be more admirable than 
32 



SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 

this plot as a skeleton for a burlesque. It 
is obvious, conventional, symmetrical, and 
just new enough to awaken in any audience 
agreeable anticipations. I forgot to men- 
tion that before the curtain goes up, and 
after it comes down, there are some gentle- 
men who appear on the stage and discuss 
the merits of the play, — one being dressed 
in fancy costume and intended to represent 
the traditional artistic feeling of Europe 
in the eighteenth century, and the others be- 
ing types of the British dramatic critic of 
the present day. To my mind this prologue 
and epilogue were not successful, because 
they were not clever enough. Something 
dragged, and one wished the talkers would 
stop. But the dramatic idea of this pro- 
logue and epilogue was admirable. The 
play itself is interesting from beginning to 
end and shows well enough that a conver- 
sation play, with a well-set-up, cast-iron 
frame behind the characters, is a good kind 
of play. It holds its own; it pleases. And 
one may remark incidentally that the Greek 
drama very often depends on the same ar- 
rangement for its success — cast-iron plot 
behind, character-talking in front. 

Shaw is a sincere playwright, and when 
we consider the fluffy mediocrity of the old 
33 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

plays, and of the old-style acting which 
Shaw's drama supplanted, we cannot help 
being grateful to him. He has revolution- 
ized English acting. He has produced act- 
ors who, within their rather narrow limits, 
are as good as French actors. Shaw is a 
sincere artist; he writes for himself and to 
satisfy himself. He has thus rediscovered 
one of the psychological secrets of art. The 
way to interest the world is for a man to 
write for himself. Shaw, as a man, is in- 
terested in the contrasts and incongruities 
of ethical theory which modern (perhaps 
all) life shows. His mind is satisfied when 
he has apprehended the irreconcilable con- 
flicts in the world of morality. As an 
artist he is satisfied when he has successfully 
presented one or some of these conflicts. 
He really seeks nothing beyond this in his 
art; and yet the fact that he came into no- 
tice as a social agitator has left its heavy 
trace on his art: it makes him preach. 

Whether it be preaching or poetry, how- 
ever, Shaw's work has got him the atten- 
tion of the world. Any group of educated 
people anywhere will be thrown into ex- 
cited discussion by almost any bit of Shaw's 
work. This shows not only that Shaw is a 
very powerful and remarkable being, but 
34 



SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 

also that his work bears a peculiar and vital 
relation to the passing moment. Some peo- 
ple think that Shaw's purpose is to amuse 
the fools and to bewilder the thinkers. My 
own belief is that Shaw wants merely to 
get heard of and to make money. Social- 
ism and play-writing are his rattle. When 
he was young and poor he agitated it 
loudly ; and now that he is rich and famous 
he knows how to do nothing else except to 
work this rattle. You cannot say he is a 
man without heart: he is the kindliest of 
men. But he is a man without taste or rev- 
erence. He does not know that there are 
things which cannot be made funny. He 
is a man in whose composition something is 
left out. You cannot blame him, any more 
than you can blame the color-blind. He is 
beauty-blind, and amuses himself with see- 
ing what grotesques he can pick out of the 
carpet of life. 

The objections to Shaw are thus seen to 
be not dramatic, but personal, and again, in 
a sense, not personal, but generic and of the 
age. Shaw's crude and cruel treatment of 
humanity — all done in the name of Fabi- 
anism (whatever that is), the somewhat 
loathsome touch of the social reformer who 
has worn off the fine edges of his feelings 
35 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

by contact with grossness (we find this 
touch sometimes in a certain type of clergy- 
man), keep sending chills of an unpleasant 
kind through a sensitive auditor, and chills 
of a very agreeable kind through the auditor 
who is deficient in human feeling or defi- 
cient in artistic experience. I suppose the 
fault of Shaw is like the fault of Ibsen. 
Ibsen is not content unless he has rasped our 
feelings. Shaw, to be sure, can laugh, and 
is, to my mind, a thousand times a better 
man and better artist than Ibsen, who can 
only scowl. But Shaw has Ibsen's method. 
It was Ibsen who first found out that the 
public was callous. Ibsen reasoned thus: 
"If you want to give emotion to the aver- 
age playgoer you must take a rusty blade 
from an old razor, attach it to a brick, and 
therewith suddenly shave off one of a man's 
toes. That is art." Shaw has the same 
rake-and-saw theory. He cannot mention 
adultery (and it is his chief theme) without 
seeming to soil the whole of human nature 
in doing so. 

In all this obtuseness Shaw is a child of 
the age, and his popularity depends upon 
this very crudity. If Shaw should touch 
human nature with the loving hand of, say, 
Moliere, or present his characters in the 
36 



SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 

transparent and pleasing atmosphere of 
sound-hearted humanity, his peculiar audi- 
ence to-day would not understand him. He 
would lose his charm for his public; I say 
not for all the public (witness the charming 
plays that succeed), but for his public. 
Whatever Hamlet may have intimated to 
the contrary, caviare is what half the mil- 
lion wants to-day. We must have mustard 
at every course. We like the butter to be 
a little rancid, and humor seems flat unless 
it contains just a little tang of doubt as to 
the fundamental truth of virtue and honor. 
Such a public takes the romance out of its 
theater; and the loss is particularly visible 
in the romantic roles — namely, in the 
young characters. 

" Fanny's First Play " contains four ad- 
mirable middle-aged persons, kindly han- 
dled — three of them could not be better. 
The fourth, the religious woman, is only 
painful because she is rendered unkindly. 
Shaw is afraid that we shall not see the 
point unless he overdraws her a little. Some 
people tell me that Mrs. Knox is not in- 
tended to be a caricature, but a serious por- 
trait of humanity. This amounts to saying 
that Shaw's harshness comes from the lack 
of fine perception, not from malice. It 
37 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

may be so; but Mrs. Knox's portrait re- 
mains a caricature. But the young people ! 
The mushy boy ; the flat heroine, who " sees 
life " as it were by accident, and then takes 
the bit in her teeth and proclaims some sort 
of half-considered " freedom/' She is sup- 
posed to be very virtuous, yet her virtue is 
not agreeable; she is supposed to be inno- 
cent, yet somehow she seems corrupt. 
What is it that these young persons lack? 
Why, they lack feeling. The girl has no 
gospel: she is a bold-faced jig. She really 
isn't a character at all, but is like a face 
drawn with one scratch of chalk, which 
shows only a single eye and but half an ear. 
The boy hero is a puppy without sentiments. 
The butler is perhaps intended to typify 
wisdom and goodness. One cannot tell. 
As a butler of comedy he is perfect. Let us 
leave him at that. 

During the performance that I witnessed 
I observed about fifteen young girls sitting 
in the row in front of me, who devoured all 
this medley of twentieth-century confusion 
with eyes of rapturous interest. They 
were the graduating class from a fashion- 
able school, and this was part of their " fin- 
ishing." Their parents in Oshkosh and 
Patagonia will be delighted when the mail 
38 



SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 

brings them word that the school is keeping 
their daughters in touch with European cul- 
ture. It must be remembered that the 
most corrupt touch in the play consists in 
the fact that it is supposed to be written 
by a young girl. Hence girls flock to see it. 

And this recalls to me a strange thing 
that has been happening for some years past 
to the young girls in New York City. The 
dress and carriage of the just-grown-up 
misses there, I mean of the fashionable 
ones, is such as to suggest an ambition on 
their part of seeming to be worse than they 
are. The expression of their faces — 
which, by the way, are often painted — is 
what the older dramatists would have desig- 
nated as " wanton." And yet a baby fresh- 
ness and youthful emptiness peeps through 
the veneer of crime. Surely this class of 
boarding-school girl is a strange product of 
contemporary life. 

I suspect that, at maturity, some of these 
girls may be found in the divorce courts, 
whether as parties or as co-respondents. 
The row of them that watched " Fanny's 
First Play" took the play seriously — viz., 
as a very good joke. And every time a ref- 
erence to adultery was made by the actors, 
the girls giggled in a knowing manner. At 
39 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

one of the wittiest points in the play, where 
the butler gives a tip to the Frenchman to 
the effect that the little street lady is what 
in France is so decently and accurately 
called a iille de joie, my whole row of young 
ladies burst into uncontrollable gayety, as 
if they had never heard anything more 
lively. 

Now what did these girls know about 
the world (so much more than I did), that 
they laughed at a sally which rather shocked 
me? How did they ever get so far along 
in a knowledge of the demi-monde? And 
were they right in seeing a good picture of 
life in the crude and blatant immorality of 
Shaw ? The fact is that these girls are not 
only being corrupted but deceived. Their 
feather-brained parents and guardians are 
feeding the creatures to Moloch and Astarte 
because it is fashionable to be immoral. 
No doubt there could be found among these 
very innocents many girls who would like 
to remain honest women, even in thought, 
if they had but known such a thing were 
possible in modern days. It is an interest- 
ing and yet awful glimpse into every-day 
life that we get through the minds of these 
virgins. The play, the name of the play, 
40 



SHAW AND MODERN DRAMA 

and the presence of the girls — all these ele- 
ments are symptomatic and inevitable. 

During the last thirty years there has 
been a great demand in Europe for coarse 
literature, obvious, crude, and bold — fit- 
ted for the appreciation of luxurious and 
materialistic persons, of ignorant persons, 
of fatigued persons. New wealth joins 
forces with effete culture in search of sen- 
sation. The increasing demand for pi- 
quancy which such an audience implies, has 
led to an ever-increasing grossness of con- 
ception on the part of the artists. Wher- 
ever the relations of the sexes were con- 
cerned, this intensification has led, of 
course, to pictures of female depravity at 
younger and ever younger ages. It seems 
as if the limits of indelicacy had now been 
reached by this school of play-writing (un- 
less childhood is to be attacked), and we 
may expect an emotional revival. 



DR. HORACE HOWARD 
FURNESS 



IV 

DR. HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

Dr. Furness was at the time of his death 
the most famous of American scholars. 
The sixteen great volumes of his Variorum 
Shakespeare are like the Fondaco dei Te- 
deschi at Venice, — a casket and a monu- 
ment, a thing of beauty and a symbol of 
ancient wealth. 

In one of his prefaces Dr. Furness says 
that every textual variant of the volume in 
question has been thrice verified by himself. 
These textual variants or alternate readings 
are the ashes of the various texts that have 
successively been evolved and destroyed by 
one and another of Shakespeare's editors 
since the earliest times ; and these ashes are 
preserved, lest perchance a little scrap of 
gold should somewhere be left among them, 
or lest there should lurk in them some gleam 
of the life of that phoenix that flew forth 
out of them. 

But the labor of endless textual detail is 
45 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

only one feature of Dr. Furness's work on 
Shakespeare's monument. The other sides 
of his work are less dreadful to think of. 
His aim was to bring the substance of all 
the books ever written about Shakespeare 
into the compass of a single edition. Any 
other man would have attacked his work like 
a beaver. Dr. Furness attacked it like a bee. 
His sunny disposition turned the gigantic 
work into pleasure. And here a strange 
fact may be perceived — that Dr. Furness 
ended by weaving his own character and 
personality into this edition as completely 
as if he had been writing his memoirs, or 
making a portrait of himself for posterity. 
Furness's notes and glossaries abound in 
that playful tenderness which I feel sure 
was the characteristic quality of Shake- 
speare himself. I am certain that an un- 
willingness to hurt anyone's feelings was the 
most noticeable quality in Shakespeare, and 
that this is why Shakespeare was so often 
called " gentle " by his contemporaries. 
(Imagine a stage-manager who should be 
nicknamed " gentle " to-day !) 

If, as I just said, Dr. Furness has written 

himself into these volumes, it is because in 

dealing with the Shakespeare legends he 

only takes what he loves, and he only loves 

46 




From a photograph by Gutekunst 

HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

thyme and sweet-william. If a subject dis- 
pleases him, he drops it. For instance, he 
cannot bear to speak ill of such a good 
Elizabethan as John Payne Collier; and he, 
therefore, frankly says that no discussion of 
the Collier forgery question can be looked 
for from him. This is not what is called 
scholarship; but it is something better than 
scholarship, it is character, it is tempera- 
ment, it is vitality. 

No great scholar has ever written such a 
good commentary on Shakespeare as Dr. 
Furness has written ; because all great scho- 
lars are apt to become bores. It is really 
their duty and their destiny to be bores. 
Even A. C. Bradley, the latest and greatest 
of Shakespearian scholars, is just a little, 
slightly a bore. The note of virtuosity is in 
him. Dr. Furness was really engaged in ar- 
ranging, condensing, and transcribing the 
things that he thought vital in Shakespeare's 
literary history. He was one kind of a 
scholar; but he belonged to that type and 
species of scholarship of which Bishop Percy 
and Walter Scott are examples, the species to 
whom literature is food and drink. To 
some modern scholars, literature is a dead 
body, or at least a subject for vivisection 
— never a live animal to be stroked and 
47 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

talked to, befriended, lived with, laughed 
and cried over. 

Furness's tone about his own views is so 
modest that he almost seems to have no 
views of his own; and when he suggests an 
idea of his own, he barely hazards it, and 
that in the fewest words. What great 
scholar ever did the like? Dr. Furness 
collects all the bones and tidbits from three 
hundred years of Shakespearian contro- 
versy; and having laid them before you, 
scampers away with a jest. The result is 
that he has written enchanting commenta- 
ries which frame Shakespeare with a genial 
sort of foolery that is near kin to Shake- 
speare's own spirit. 

This Variorum Edition will cause many 
old Shakespeariana to go out of print. The 
positive results of many a great commenta- 
tor's life may be embodied in an improved 
text; and the wagon-loads of disquisition 
which at first were essential, soon become 
superfluous through their very success. 
The same reasoning holds good in regard 
to the theories which course like dolphins in 
Shakespeare's wake, theories as to the chro- 
nology of the plays, theories as to the 
sources of their plots, and the metaphysics 
of their characters. A brochure upon any 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

such topic will in a few years shrink and dry- 
up, till it can be carried in a mere footnote. 
Indeed, any idea must be quite monumental 
at the beginning of its career, in order that 
posterity shall afford it more than an aster- 
isk. 

The notes and disquisitions in the Vari- 
orum Edition give you all you are ever 
likely to want of a host of old worthies and 
worthiesses who strutted their little day, and 
penned with quill pens and steel pens their 
various comments. I love the race of men 
who write notes on great books, whether on 
Dante or on Shakespeare. They collect 
miscellaneous information and they chatter 
like happy magpies. They keep literature 
alive, like Darwin's earthworms, by creep- 
ing down out of sight and bringing new soil 
to the top. Without them some poets would 
be incomprehensible within a few decades 
after death. Dante would be unread to- 
day, Chaucer and Shakespeare would be al- 
most gone, and Byron would be on the road 
to oblivion. To put all the Shakespeare 
chatterers into one great aviary, to tame 
them, docket them, assign them their 
perches and index them — this was the 
work of Dr. Furness's life. The Variorum 
is really a Shakespeare library; and no pri- 
49 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

vate person has need to encumber his shelves 
with more authorities than this edition sup- 
plies. If a man wants to make a beast of 
himself, let him go to a public library. 

My acquaintance with Dr. Furness was 
slight, or rather, I should say, it was short, 
and did not occur till 19 12, when he was in 
his seventy-ninth year. But the man him- 
self cast back such a light on his books, and 
his books now begin to cast forward such a 
light on the man, that his image is very clear 
in my mind. It is the image of the perfect 
scholar, and of the great gentleman, through 
whom there yet shines a crystal idea of 
something nobler than either. He was all 
his life a man of various social activities 
and of great influence ; and this contact with 
life gave him a robustness and rotundity of 
nature which literary men often lack. 

He certainly was the most picturesque old 
gentleman that I have ever known. He was 
short and stout — his head, with its large 
dome, was fringed with the most brilliant 
white hair — immaculate, gleaming hair. 
His gold eyeglasses, which were very trans- 
parent and which magnified the gray eyes 
behind them, his elegant, delicate silver ear- 
trumpet — (more like some elfin horn, or the 
ornament of a fairy king or goblin herald, 
50 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

than a necessary instrument), that horn 
which was always at hand, always being 
adjusted to receive good news from the 
guest — his wonderful neatness and trim- 
ness — as if his waistcoat and watch-chain 
had been burnished upon him — as if his 
clothes were made of bronze, or as if he 
were a drawing by Ingres — all these things, 
as well as the smiling trustfulness (like that 
of a good child) with which he welcomed 
everyone, took him out of the actual. You 
could not believe that he was true. He was 
as a picture, or as a character of the imag- 
ination. Of course he really did belong to 
a familiar epoch ; but somehow his deafness 
had isolated him and surrounded him with 
an invisible hothouse. There was a bloom 
upon him; he radiated a sort of heaven-sent 
bonhomie. I am sure that if I had seen him 
in a railroad station without knowing who 
he was, I should have followed him home, 
tracked him to his habitat, so as to assure 
myself that he was an earthborn creature. 

Think of such a man's having lived in the 
America of to-day! He might have come 
out of London in 1811 ; he might have lived 
in Edinburgh in 1830. He was like Charles 
Lamb; he seemed to be clad in knee- 
breeches; he was all leisure, all literature, 
51 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

all tenderness for the feelings of others. I 
am sure that this quality of hating to hurt 
anyone's feelings, of avoiding the unpleas- 
ant, must somewhere, somehow have run 
into vice with Dr. Furness. It is wrong to 
be so tender as he was. 

Dr. Furness, as everyone knows, was 
deaf — so very deaf that one had to speak 
into his silver ear-trumpet and speak quite 
loudly in order to reach him. Yet his deaf- 
ness never separated him from the rest of 
society, but on the contrary it joined him 
to others. His expression of perfect be- 
nevolence and perfect accord, as he surveyed 
the dinner-table, his smile of expectation as 
he caught your eye, gave you something to 
say. You could not be dumb in his pres- 
ence. In fact, his deafness had the very 
opposite influence to that which deafness 
usually has: it drew you out. He elicited 
extravagant sallies ; he invited foolishness : 
and when foolishness came, he welcomed it 
as the Father in the parable welcomed the 
Prodigal. One knew all the while that 
somewhere in the middle of all this gayety 
there lay a great renunciation. This power 
to give and take innocent pleasure is always 
bought with a great price. A big lump sum 
has been paid down at some time in the past, 
52 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

so great that the interest of it supports the 
donor forever after; he is care- free. 

Dr. Furness had cunning ways, he did 
cunning things; but they were always very 
clever. He himself was never deceived 
for a moment. He understood his droller- 
ies well enough. When, for instance, I 
asked him why it was, or why he thought it 
was, that Fanny Kemble had singled out 
just him as the person to whom she should 
give Shakespeare's gloves — he assumed the 
attitude of the ingenue in old English 
comedy — put his knuckles to his lips, 
looked archly at the ceiling, bent his head 
from side to side — " I don't know, I don't 
know." A lifelong familiarity with old 
English stage businesses had given him quite 
a battery of odd little gestures and tones of 
voice, which were as natural to him as they 
were unexpected by everyone else. 

Dr. Furness had habits of a clockwork 
regularity. He rose at a certain hour, 
whatever it was, to the minute, and ap- 
peared at breakfast, which was a stately and 
sumptuous meal, long, luxurious, and social. 
Then he suddenly disappeared, and I don't 
know what he did for several hours. He 
performed his Shakespearian work in the 
S3 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

middle of the night. After sitting up crack- 
ing jokes, or reading aloud, till twelve or 
one, he dismissed everyone and sat down to 
work till cock-crow. His library was of 
that sort which is added to the house as a 
unity — is lighted from the top and sur- 
rounded inside with a balcony. The room 
was full of memorials, pictures, and photo- 
graphs, and was lined with all the books 
about Shakespeare, I suppose, in the world. 
In a small vault or inner sanctuary beyond, 
a fire-proof holy of holies, he kept his first 
editions. He had all the folios and a great 
many of the quartos. (I'm not sure that it 
is possible to have them all.) Here were 
kept other treasures more remarkable still — 
namely, fragments of Shakespeare's mul- 
berry tree, and a pair of gloves which origi- 
nally belonged to Shakespeare's theatrical 
properties, and which, after the playwright's 
decease, were shipped to Avon from London 
together with the rest of his belongings. 
These gloves are perhaps the most precious 
personal relic in the world. I do not know 
what doubts scholars may throw on their 
authenticity ; but their history is well known 
and forms a part of the annals of the Brit- 
ish stage. At any rate, I felt in looking on 
54 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

them an overwhelming belief in them — a 
pang of belief, such as no other personal 
relic ever gave me. 

I cannot say that I always agree with Dr. 
Furness's views upon Shakespeare's char- 
acters. This is a subject upon which the 
clodhopper has rights of opinion; and some 
of Dr. Furness's theses seem to me to reflect 
his own temperament too closely — as, for 
instance, his views on the love affair between 
Anthony and Cleopatra. I must confess 
that his opinions here seem to me to be mis- 
judged and even fantastic. Dr. Furness's 
romanticism has misled him. It is himself, 
[not Anthony, and not Shakespeare] that 
the seraphic Doctor has depicted in his 
rhapsodical preface to his play. And yet 
this same enthusiasm which, in this case, be- 
trays Dr. Furness is the pervading cause of 
his charm. Dr. Furness is never really in- 
terested in anything except the poetic kernel 
of Shakespeare. He deals with the other 
parts because they must be dealt with. But 
the reason for all the husk is not to be found 
in the husk; the reason lies in the poetry. 
Furness never forgets this ; he is in love all 
the time. He had the sort of adoration for 
Shakespeare that a schoolboy has for an 
elder brother. When this quality gets into 
55 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

a book of any sort, the book becomes happy 
and vigorous. " Isn't he a glorious fellow ? 
Did you ever hear anything like him?" 
This is what Furness seems to be constantly 
saying. 

Such is the general nature of Dr. Fur- 
ness's contributions to Shakespeare's criti- 
cism. They sound so small and are so 
tremendous. For I suppose that the sun- 
light hidden everywhere in these big yellow 
volumes is enough to warm the earth. It 
will surely affect the disposition of all future 
commentators; and even the philologist, the 
comparative grammarian, the Indo-Ger- 
manic person may be softened, tinged, sweet- 
ened, and made into something more nearly 
resembling a human being, through contact 
with the unscientific, non-conclusive intellect 
of Horace Howard Furness. 

A short time before his death, Dr. Furness 
sent me a copy of his Phi Beta Kappa ad- 
dress entitled, " Shakespeare, or What You 
Will " ; and in thanking him for it I sent him 
the verses printed below, which thus be- 
came the occasion of this paper. His death 
fell like a curtain, unexpectedly, without ill- 
ness, without premonitory old age; and, as 
it fell, it left him in our imagination just 
56 



HORACE HOWARD FURNESS 

as he had always appeared, standing in a 
sort of radiance. 

" Yes, I have seen the wreath of woven flowers 
That in your garden (which is Shakespeare's 
mind) 

Have blossomed freshly through the dewy hours, 
And which the deaf, old gardener smiled to find. 

" Laughed as he found them — saved and wound and 
gave them: 
(The richest trophy that his life could bring), 
Shakespeare's they are, and were, and he shall have 
them 
Forever as a fragrant offering. 

" So, on thy bier, old servant, tried and tender, 
Some loving hand may lay a paler sheaf; 

For none but Shakespeare might thy crimson render, 
Or match in words the greenness of thy leaf." 



ST 



HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 



V 

HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 

Henry Grafton Chapman, who died in 
his fifty-third year in January, 191 3, was 
one of those quiet men who seem to bear no 
relation to the age they are born in. By 
his endowments, his tastes, and his educa- 
tion he was fitted to be an amateur of a kind 
very common in Europe, — one of the studi- 
ous, well-nigh learned children of culture, 
who love books, pictures, music, philosophy, 
the lamp, and the quiet conclave with infi- 
nite good talk. If Henry Chapman had had 
the fortune to have been born in Europe or 
in China, and to inherit money, his life 
would have been a record of cheerful suc- 
cess, even as it was, in America, a record of 
cheerful toil. 

For some reason there was a glory about 
his boyhood. He was the prize boy of his 
set; brilliant things were predicted of him 
by everyone. His talents and charms, his 
goodness and his good looks set off, as with a 
61 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

foil, a moral worth which everyone found 
in him. A singular sweetness and gentle- 
ness of disposition remained to him all his 
life. It survived the more ambitious quali- 
ties with which we had all endowed him in 
his teens. It gilded his life and made his 
friends forgive him everything; for he was 
the most negligent of men. You could not 
see him unless you looked him up and dug 
him out from among his books and papers. 
He would hold you in converse on a corner 
of Broadway at midnight with a discussion 
about Plato, and would never miss you if he 
saw you not again for fifteen years — when 
he would resume the discussion with the old 
fervor. His talk was ready, apt, amusing, 
drenched in reading. He was always writ- 
ing plays which were never produced, and 
essays just to clear his thoughts. He al- 
ways had many varieties of tales, poems, 
and literary ventures on hand. Whenever 
I met him I wondered why I didn't see 
more of him. But he was hard to see more 
of: he was elusive. He sought his own 
habitat, and would never come out of it, 
save on compulsion. 

The course of his experiments in life, be- 
fore he settled down to steady work at liter- 
ature, might easily be paralleled in the lives 
62 



HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 

of many men of letters in all countries. 
After Harvard College and the Harvard 
Law School, came work in law offices, a 
few discouraging years at the bar, a few 
other years spent in business ventures. 
Then five years of organized reform. In 
this latter field my brother did valuable 
work, and for some years he was extremely 
active at Albany as an agent of the Civil 
Service League. He was also the editor of 
the League's newspaper. Both his legal 
training and his literary facility came into 
play in these avocations. Mr. George Mc- 
Aneny writes me: 

" His quiet influence during the period of 
his active touch with public affairs did a 
great deal for the betterment of things in 
this town. I knew him best during his 
secretaryship in the Civil Service Reform 
League, to the work of which he gave a de- 
voted order of service — just as his grand- 
father, John Jay, as a member of Governor 
Cleveland's first Civil Service Commission, 
had given before him. He made ' Good 
Government/ the organ of the League, a 
much more serviceable organ than it ever 
had been before, adding to its influence 
everywhere. He proved, too, a most valu- 
63 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

able aid in the handling of legislation affect- 
ing the Civil Service, proposed from year to 
year at Albany, — always, I believe, with 
good result. He went about everything 
quietly, but he did a lot of useful work." 

Henry Chapman certainly was fitted to 
be a journalist of the first order, but he 
lacked the impulsion; and I cannot blame 
him for deserting reform, since this led to 
his taking up a kind of work for which he 
had a real gift — namely, translation. 

All his life long my brother wrote verses 
which were marked by singular ease and 
grace. He was the producer of the occa- 
sional verses demanded by his college class, 
by the Porcellian Club, by the B K, etc. 
He could write any species of verse, and 
he loved to do so. His ear was true and 
very experienced. He knew a little Latin 
and Greek, and a great deal of French and 
German, which languages he had learned as 
a boy in Europe. He could write French 
and German, and could read, you might say, 
any modern language ; for he had a passion 
for etymology and was always pushing his 
studies further in this field. He had a wide, 
miscellaneous reading in English, French, 
and German, but his main hobby was 
64 



HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 

modern philosophy, upon which he loved to 
hold forth. 

In his later years he supported himself 
by translating libretti and songs. Dr. Baker, 
the musical adviser of G. Schirmer, with 
whom Henry was most closely associated 
in this work, writes as follows in the Bulle- 
tin of New Music: 

" In the death of Henry Grafton Chap- 
man, which occurred on January 16 in New 
York, the house of G. Schirmer mourns the 
loss of a friend and gifted coadjutor, a man 
to whom the musical world owes a debt of 
gratitude and respect. Of highly versa- 
tile talent, Mr. Chapman's life-work — the 
work which shall live after him — was final- 
ly found in the poetic reproduction in Eng- 
lish of those choice poems by foreign 
writers to which music has been set by com- 
posers of genius. 

" Let none regard this work as a matter of 
small moment, as something to be tossed off 
in idle hours, or as something of low degree 
not to be ranked with the finer products of 
literary labor. It is true that, only too fre- 
quently, a ' good working translation ' is the 
utmost ambition of the English versifier; a 
version which will ' sing well/ which rhymes 
65 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

fairly well, and does not conflict too glar- 
ingly in accentuation with the original; — 
as for ' sense ' and ' poetic feeling/ these 
are made wholly secondary considerations, 
if considered at all. 

" Mr. Chapman's work was on a different 
plane. He entered at once into the mood 
and spirit of the poem before him. Equally 
at home in styles naive, sentimental, humor- 
ous, capricious, or passionate, he then, by 
some genial alchemy of which he possessed 
the secret, transmuted the exotic prototype 
into English verse often equal in excellence 
to, and not seldom surpassing, the original in 
poetic flow and fervor. He still observed the 
meter and the accent, and the rhyme, too, 
wherever possible, but rendered these sub- 
ordinate to the thought and expression, using 
them, like the foreign authors, as a vehicle 
for ideas and emotions, not as a jingle to fit 
the music. In raising the translation of 
poems, penned by great writers and vivified 
and embellished by great tone-poets, from 
the level of hack-work into the realm of art, 
Mr. Chapman has rendered inestimable serv- 
ice to the art and practice of song in the 
English language. So long as many of the 
finest vocal gems were accessible only in the 
foreign originals or mediocre translations, 
66 



HENRY GRAFTON CHAPMAN 

they could not be fully appreciated and en- 
joyed by the large majority of our singers ; 
but with this exquisite music wedded to real 
poetry, the value of such songs has been 
enhanced beyond computation. 

" By the foregoing remarks no disparage- 
ment is intended of numerous sporadic suc- 
cessful attempts at translation, made and 
making by other English writers. The 
point is, that no other musical translator has 
accomplished a tithe of Mr. Chapman's 
achievement in this field. In the brief space 
of about eight years he finished for the firm 
of G. Schirmer between seven and eight 
hundred songs, ballads, arias, choruses, and 
the like; twelve oratorios and cantatas 
(sacred and secular) ; and nine complete 
operas, including works so widely divergent 
in character as Debussy's * Pelleas et Meli- 
sande ' (Maeterlinck), Leoncavallo's ' Pa- 
gliacci,' and Wagner's Tristan und Isolde/ 
And in how masterly fashion did he over- 
come the immense difficulties presented by 
the various masterworks ! — difficulties 
which can be realized only by those who 
have essayed similar tasks. In his best mo- 
ments it is as if, upborne by the inspiration 
of the poem, he rose with the authors them- 
selves to their own height and surveyed the 
67 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

lyric or dramatic situation with the same 
lofty passion, the same swift and sure 
glance. From the simplest folk-song to the 
sublime complexities of * Tristan/ he made 
each passing mood his own. He did not 
roughly l pluck the heart ' from out the 
stranger verses; he intimately blended their 
essence, their soul, with his own spirit, and 
poured the mingled tide into a mold of fine- 
ly wrought English. To their inspiration 
he lent his own; and many of the poems so 
molded are genuine works of genius. What 
he could do when inspired solely by the 
music, without the transcription of others' 
thoughts and effusions, is shown in his de- 
lightful original verses accompanying the 
' Blue Danube ' waltzes." 



68 



THE FUNCTION OF THE 
CHURCH SCHOOL 



Address to the boys at St. Paul's School, Con- 
cord, N. H. 



VI 



THE FUNCTION OF THE CHURCH 
SCHOOL 

If you have ever taken a walk in the woods 
with a naturalist or a hunter, you must have 
felt what ears, what eyes, what senses the 
man had. You must have felt that he was 
walking in a magic world, among sights and 
sounds that you could not catch, a world 
throbbing with idea and wonderful with 
reality. Now all of education may be 
thought of as a means of giving to youth 
the keys of the different worlds that exist 
about us, — exist all together, one inside the 
other, like the celestial spheres of the old 
Astronomy, — worlds of different sorts of 
reality, different kinds of intellect, — every- 
one of them as real and as thrilling to the 
soul that lives in it as the woods are to the 
naturalist or to the hunter, — a place where 
the air is filled with meaning and where 
every sound, every leaf that falls or twig 
that cracks in the distance, brings a message 
7i 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

to the listener, a summons, an idea, — com- 
munication with the universe. 

In the A B C stage of education the mean- 
ing of it all is not very apparent. Now and 
then there is born a child of genius who 
takes a passionate interest in the alphabet 
and knows by instinct that the letters on his 
blocks, or the drawing of a horse on his 
slate, or the strange dots and lines of his 
first music lesson are mystic things which 
put him in touch with all intellect, all his- 
tory, all religion, — all the gigantic forces 
of human life and destiny. But for the 
most part children have to grind forward 
without knowing very clearly what it is all 
about, or why they are put through the regi- 
men. The mind is so complex, and all these 
various spirit worlds are so strangely in- 
terlocked with each other, — and besides this, 
so little is known about youth and develop- 
ment, — that you can never be quite sure 
that you are on the right track. When you 
try to fit education to the individual, you 
must keep a loose rein, and remember that 
your knowledge of the individual is very 
shadowy, and your knowledge of what 
comes next, of what the creature will turn 
into next, is very shadowy. You may be 
feeding a caterpillar under the belief that it 
72 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 

is a silk-worm, and behold it turns out to be 
a June bug. The surest thing is to follow 
general principles and general traditions. 
Even this is very unsure ; but it is less unsure 
than anything else. All of you boys have 
been getting the sort of education that has 
been gradually evolved and invented for 
boys; and it all bears some relation to the 
immense antiquity out of which it comes 
down to us, and to the heights and depths of 
life, the totality of human experience, of 
which it forms a part. You must make the 
best out of it that you can. You see, educa- 
tion is merely the attempt to prevent the 
youth from missing his birthright, — to pre- 
vent him from going by his destination in 
the night, while he holds a ticket for the 
great festival in his sleeping hands. 

I am now fifty years old, and I find in 
going back to school and college and in meet- 
ing my old classmates, how grateful they are 
to their schools and colleges, how they hug 
the little scrap of insight which destiny ac- 
corded them, their glimpse into the peep 
show. They were given just one look, and 
then they were seized by the shoulder and 
hurled into practical life, the life of business, 
of self-support, of unidea'd labor, in which 
there was little time to do more than oc- 
73 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

casionally remember that peep show. I fear 
that the same experience awaits many of 
you. It is because a little education is so 
infinitely much greater than none at all that 
you are here. It is because the beginnings 
of education, — no matter how great, — may 
be got at St. Paul's School, that you are 
here. 

You must not expect to understand very 
much about school just yet. The general 
rule seems to be that we do not understand 
our experiences until they have become past 
history. For instance, you will find old men 
describing their school days and describing 
how they parted from their parents, describ- 
ing the holidays, and giving in the recital 
the very atmosphere of reality and of ro- 
mance, — of human life, — which at the mo- 
ment there was no time for. Yet somehow 
the great romance was alive and was going 
on in those little boys. It is a very rare mat- 
ter when any of us at any time in life sees 
things as they are at the moment. This 
happens at times of great spiritual exalta- 
tion, when our minds are so awakened, and 
the inner and half-slumbering part of us is 
so awakened that we become aware of what 
is going on about us and of the infinite great 
worlds of force, of feeling and of idea in 
74 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 

which we live, and in the midst of which 
we have always been living. These worlds 
are really in progress all the time; and the 
difference between one man and another, or 
the difference in the same man at different 
times, is the difference in his awareness of 
what is happening. 

I used to wonder what it was in Beetho- 
ven that was so impressive and why we are 
so moved by his music. About what is he 
talking; and where does it all go when he 
stops? There is a sense in which Beetho- 
ven's music is always going on within us. 
Those inner chords are forever vibrating, 
that mystery play is forever on the stage, 
that paean going up: those human strains 
are being given off by the fibres within us 
all the time. And Beethoven's awareness 
of this music has enabled him to let these 
strains become expressed and continued out- 
ward into sound. He did not exactly make 
that music ; but merely had the art to trans- 
mit it, — to allow it to have its way through 
him. The old poetic metaphors about in- 
spiration express the dynamics of an eternal 
transmission of power from soul to soul, 
and express them very well. 

I am speaking all this time in terms of 
education; but I am really thinking about 
75 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

religion. Now religion is not so much a 
thing by itself as a way of feeling, an in- 
ward experience as to the nature of life, 
which colors and changes the world. It is 
a personal experience. No one can describe 
it or convey it to another. There has al- 
ways been this incalculable element about re- 
ligious experience. The wind bloweth 
where it listeth — even so is everyone that 
is born of the spirit. Religion is the con- 
sciousness of the presence of God. It often 
descends upon people in trouble, in moments 
of crisis. When all else is taken, it rushes 
in — I should say, seems to rush in ; for it 
is really always present in all men, — only 
disguised and concealed by the clouds of 
other interests and occupations. 

You boys must often wonder, as I used 
to wonder in this room, what it is all about ? 
— What is this religion that seems to be 
of so much importance? It is evidently at 
the bottom of St. Paul's School. The 
founders are founding it, the rectors are 
preaching it, the choirs are singing it. We 
walk it in and out of chapel, and rustle it 
in hymn books and undergo it in reproach- 
ful lectures for our misconduct. Some peo- 
ple seem to believe that it is pocketed in 
scriptural texts, and surely fitted into the 
76 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 

catechism. All this language of religious 
feeling that surrounds you at St. Paul's 
School is the language of the mystery of 
life. That mystery will endure forever. It 
will outlast contemporary science, and over- 
shadow future science. It comes to you in 
the voice of many generations speaking 
about the profoundest truths of life. You 
are here living in the sound of that voice. 
You hardly understand it; you hear it un- 
consciously ; at times you catch a few sylla- 
bles that seem intelligible, seem meant for 
you — they are somehow communications 
from the great power in the midst of which 
our life goes on, the power which drives and, 
is our life. If there were any sure way by 
which the child could be put into conscious 
relation with God, — if he could be shown 
these mysteries, as he may be led out and 
shown a waterfall, — then all this machinery 
would not be needed : — all this literature, 
this music, discipline, prayer, praise and 
worship of God might be dispensed with or 
replaced. But, as the old Jews used to say 
" No man hath seen God at any time." This 
whole matter is not a thing by itself which 
can be grasped. It is a part of everything 
else. It underlies all thought : it is something 
which grasps us. When it comes, it comes. 
77 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

It is not a universal experience. Some peo- 
ple, great people, men of power and sanctity, 
who fill the world with good deeds, and 
fill us who gaze upon them with a sense of 
religion, — have lived without that sense 
themselves. The power that works in them 
is veiled from them. 

There is one danger that hangs about re- 
ligion : it hangs about science, about thought, 
about human character,— the danger of 
feeling sure one is right. The evils that fol- 
low in the wake of this danger are so univer- 
sal that perhaps we ought to think of the 
whole matter as a law of nature. If a man 
begins to believe that he holds the truth fast, 
holds it in a formula that is like an inde- 
structible casket, then immediately the casket 
begins to dissolve, and we discover that the 
truth never was in his casket at all, but be- 
hind it, — as it is behind all things. There 
is a sort of docility of mind, a knowledge of 
our own impotence, that is very near to the 
threshold of intellectual vision and to the 
threshold of religious feeling. Whenever a 
man has this sentiment very strongly, people 
almost always give him credit for being 
somehow a religious person — even if the 
man protests he is not interested in religion. 
It seems to be true that great intellects are 
78 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 

almost always filled with this sense of not 
quite understanding what truth is, of being 
powerless and ignorant. Emerson said that 
it has always been the mark of an intellect 
of the first order that a man should feel 
about the world as if the explanation of it 
could not be given here ; but that the whole 
matter must draw its meaning from some- 
thing else, something we do not know. The 
people who feel like this are not always con- 
scious of God. I would not cite them as 
examples of religious feeling. I cite them 
as examples of that docility which is very 
near to religion. This thing is very easy 
to lose. I have often thought that this 
docility which evaporates so easily may be 
referred to in the text " The fear of the 
Lord is the beginning of wisdom." Perhaps 
the text means, " The consciousness of God 
is the first step in an understanding of the 
universe." 

A man who feels this freshly, realizes its 
mystery, and will not wish to cram the ex- 
perience down the throat of another. But 
with thinking comes certitude, and with cer- 
titude comes error. It is quite strange to 
notice that the attitude of many modern 
scientists towards contemporary religious 
thought is identical with the attitude of the 
79 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

mediaeval papacy towards heresy. The 
world to-day is full of professors and stu- 
dents of science who would gladly perish in 
the market-place, and at the stake, if they 
could thereby advance the cause of science 
by an iota. Many of these men dread the 
older church teachings only because they 
have a fierce conviction that those church 
dogmas inevitably lead to the unhappiness of 
the people. The state of mind of these 
scientists is the same state of mind which a 
perfectly holy pope lived in with regard to 
heresy, — viz. : — a fierce hostility to some- 
thing which he felt sure must lead to eternal 
unhappiness. Both sets of men, both the 
pope and the scientist have lost the fresh- 
ness of their feeling through hard thinking; 
and each in setting up a monopoly, a sort of 
tyranny. The docility has died out of each 
of them. 

Indeed docility is dying out in each one 
of us all the time ; and it has to be renewed 
every morning. And so, indeed, it is being 
renewed : it is being freshly born constantly 
in new and younger men. And whenever 
one of these tyrannies or monopolies is set 
up, truth always finds means to move out 
from under the edge and dominion of the 
tyranny, and to establish its camp or king- 
80 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 

dom in the breasts of humble people who 
know little of theology or little of science. 
Here then is another law of nature. The 
faith that is given to each of us is medicine 
to the un faith of the world. We are the 
cure. 

Behind all the visions of prophets, the 
aims of churches, the struggles of teachers, 
behind apparent progress and retrogression 
there are great waves of faith that beat 
through humanity, — you might call them 
apparitions of God, — epochs when the mi- 
raculous nature of the world is understood, 
and mystic sayings become clear as print. 
Such an epoch is coming over the world at 
this moment. I cannot walk down the street 
or open a letter from a friend without mur- 
muring, " Prophets and kings have desired 
to see the things that ye see, and have died 
without seeing them." We have been re- 
turning to the apostolic age. Physics and 
metaphysics have of late joined hands to 
proclaim an unthinkable power visibly rul- 
ing all things. 

I am constantly meeting people who heal 
the sick through prayer and live in a whole- 
hearted simplicity of feeling which brings to 
mind New Testament times. I am think- 
ing of individual men and women, not of 
81 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

any church; for they frequently belong to 
no church, but are mere children of the New 
Testament. These people appear to me to 
be extremely unlike the mediaeval people. 
They are more vigorous, more at one with 
life, more courageous, unconcerned, sup- 
ported by faith. The mediaeval mind was 
always a little terrified, and there is some- 
thing sickly about the mediaeval feeling for 
the miraculous, — something that is often 
sentimental, often hysterical, often childish. 
The enormous emotionalism of the Middle 
Ages is generally tinged with a hot-house 
element of willful intensity, which is very 
different from the natural human feeling 
of the earliest Christians and the strong 
faith of the latest. Then, too, the preoccu- 
pation with church discipline which fills the 
intervening centuries, makes pictures in our 
imagination which do not fit in with the 
Bible pictures. It seems as if the teach- 
ings of Christ had not been understood since 
that first century until to-day, — as if that 
teaching were, within the past few years, 
beginning to affect our minds in the right 
kind of way. During all those centuries 
between the crucifixion and to-day, Christ's 
teaching was administered and used as a 
drug. But now men are more willing to let 
82 



THE CHURCH SCHOOL 

it do its own work. It is better understood. 
It is seen to be a part of the light and air, 
of the palpitation of life, of the machinery 
of the universe. 



S3 



MR. BRIMMER 



vn 

MR. BRIMMER 

Martin Brimmer was the finest gentleman 
that I have ever known intimately; and I 
never met him without feeling that I myself 
was a boor, but that this was of no conse- 
quence, because his breeding and goodness 
sufficed to cover my nakedness. I might 
gambol or even wallow, but he would blos- 
som in the perfection of self-effacing cour- 
tesy. 

He was the best of old Boston; for he 
was not quite inside the Puritan tradition 
and was a little sweeter by nature and less 
sure he was right than the true Bostonian 
is. He was a lame, frail man, with fortune 
and position ; and one felt that he had been a 
lame, frail boy, lonely, cultivated, and nurs- 
ing an ideal of romantic honor. There was 
a knightly glance in his eye and a seriousness 
in his deep voice that told of his living, and 
of his having lived always, in a little Camelot 
of his own. He was not quixotic, but he 
87 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

was independent. There were portcullises 
and moats and flowered gardens around him. 
He was humble with a kind of Hidalgo 
humility, — the humility of a magnificent 
impoverished Portuguese Duke. There was 
nothing sanctimonious about his mind, and 
this is what really distinguished him from 
the adjacent Bostonian nobility. 

In looking at the eighteenth century por- 
traits of Puritan Elders, I have often re- 
flected that the Puritans were traders. 
Whatever they may have been when they 
first landed, they soon became keen-eyed and 
practical, hard and cold. Their resemblance 
to the old Venetian merchants may be 
traced in the Doge's Palace, where the 
cold, Yankee faces loom down familiarly on 
the shuddering American tourist. I could 
attach to almost every portrait in Venice an 
honored Puritan name; and, with a little 
study and reflection, I could tell how each 
pictured aristocrat must have made his 
money. There was in Mr. Brimmer noth- 
ing of that austere look which comes from 
holding on to property and standing pat. 
And besides this, he was warm; not, per- 
haps, quite as warm as the Tropics, but very 
much warmer than the average Beacon 
Street mantel-pieces were. He would dis- 



MR. BRIMMER 

course and laugh heartily about these 
mantel-pieces, — instead of turning haughty 
and assuming a look of profaned intimacy, 
if anyone noticed the absence of fire in 
them. There was a spark of fight too in 
Mr. Brimmer; as I found to my cost once, 
when I received a letter from him beginning, 
" Sir," in the old dueling style, and more 
beautiful in its chirography than anything 
a merely democratic age can produce. 

At the time I knew him best, he was no 
longer young, and was the figure-head of 
philanthropy, art and social life in Boston. 
Mrs. Brimmer loved luxe. Her banquets 
were as dignified and well mounted as such 
things can possibly be; and the banquets 
were followed by ceremonial receptions of 
intimate friends : dear people they were, too. 
The whole procedure was accompanied by a 
certain gorgeousness and parade, which 
used to terrify me, and not me only ; for the 
whole of Boston was at that time awed by 
the splendor of these parties, yet proud of 
their grand manner. When I went to Lon- 
don a few years later, I saw some old- 
fashioned coachmen with round wigs, — I 
think they were made of glass, — and I sug- 
gested that Mrs. Brimmer ought to put some 
of these wigs on her coachmen; — but this 
89 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

was never done. The wigs, however, were 
on the banquets ; and the old-fashioned fam- 
ily servants, the inner domestic reality of 
everything in the household, made it a most 
notable establishment. 

Mr. Brimmer ate no more than a bird, 
and smoked thin, straw-colored cigars. He 
cared nothing for luxury, but moved in it 
as an old lord might move in a castle, just 
because it was there : to him it was his attic. 
His clothes were remarkable. They came 
from England, and were of the finest stuffs, 
and of the ancientest models ; and they hung 
upon him negligently. This, by the way, 
was characteristic of the true old Bosto- 
nians. They got their clothes from Poole; 
but they never tried them on. Yet, instead 
of making a ridiculous figure in the gar- 
ments, they dignified their apparel. They 
wore their clothes well; and I have seen 
octogenarian millionaires, with youthful 
hose well saved upon their shrunk shanks, 
pacing Beacon Street like old masters. Say 
what you will, there was something strong 
about the old Commonwealth; and, as it 
melted slowly into modern times, I watched 
and treasured the apparition. It was a 
great relief to me, as a college lad who was 
passing through many wrestlings of the 
90 



MR. BRIMMER 

spirit over shirts and pumps, and who 
thought there might exist some dreadful 
law of correctness in the higher circles of 
society, — it was a great relief to me, after 
I had conscientiously bought a white tie of 
the proper contemporary cut, to find that 
Martin Brimmer had done no such thing. 
Here was the finest gentleman I had ever 
seen ; but when he wanted a tie, he caused a 
valet to open a trunk and to pull from the 
bottom of it a tie of seventeen years be- 
fore. Mr. Brimmer put on the tie none too 
carefully; and came down stairs with a 
grave courtesy. The Italian nieces adjusted 
his tie, the red silk drawing-room with the 
statue of Story's Cleopatra was thrown 
open, and the great world of little Boston 
arrived with its arms outspread. 

Mrs. Brimmer afforded ideal contrasts to 
her husband. She was large, imposing, 
handsome, blonde and infantile. Her 
cheeks had never been roughly visited by 
the winds of heaven. Indeed she was one 
of those people whom the world instinctively 
surrounds with a hedge of protection. Her 
dearest friends never quite told her the 
truth; and I am sure that, in childhood, 
her playmates must always have petted her 
and given her the prettiest string of beads. 
91 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

She was a queen-bee, twice as large and 
twice as handsome as other women ; and she 
wore Damascened brocades and ostrich 
feathers, and had eyes as blue as the sky. 

That age was an age of witticisms and of 
personal hits, which were recorded and 
handed about. To-day the taste for bon- 
mots has waned, and if anyone should bring 
such a thing as a witticism into a drawing- 
room, people would balk at it and regard it 
as an old snuff-box. But in those days, 
sallies of wit were correct and conventional. 
Dr. Holmes and Tom Appleton and Judge 
Hoar were the professional wits of Bos- 
ton, just as Evarts and Travers were 
the professional wits of New York. 
Behind these veterans there were hun- 
dreds of skirmishing humorists who made 
social life agreeable. Evening receptions 
were regarded as a natural form of 
amusement ; people stood in a pack, and ate 
and drank, and talked volubly till midnight. 
And they enjoyed it too. There was a zest 
in it. I don't know why the world has be- 
come so dull of recent years, and society so 
insipid. People in Boston in the Eighties 
knew how to enjoy themselves. 

There seems to exist a great invisible 
sponge that is always passing forward and 
92 



MR. BRIMMER 

back across society and wiping out coteries 
and traditions. It never succeeds in obliter- 
ating all of cultivation or all of happiness, 
yet it seems forever on the point of doing 
so. One of the staple illusions of middle 
life is the vision of a Vanishing Past. The 
experience must be classed with youth's il- 
lusions of an oncoming Roseate Future: 
both visions are normal. Indeed it is the 
vision of the Vanishing Past that has caused 
me to write these sketches. I am afraid 
that I may forget those vivid scenes of youth 
unless I write them down. They have risen 
in my memory recently, as the mirage rises, 
— ever at a fixed distance from the be- 
holder ; and I fear they may disappear again 
as I move farther away from them. Per- 
haps there is nothing of monumental inter- 
est in these balls, weddings and tea parties 
that I attended in Boston as an undergradu- 
ate, — except as all things have historic in- 
terest. Boston was a family, — a club, — 
and is so still. Some people resent the fam- 
ily atmosphere of Boston ; but I always liked 
it. The people there speak of " Cousin 
John " and expect you to know to whom they 
refer. But this is charming! Someone 
has said that Boston was the only city in 
the world where when two ladies meet in 
93 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

the street, one says, "How is he?" The 
great business of Bostonians was to place 
values upon everything in the world, with 
conscientious accuracy. Professor Norton 
once said to me on the steps of Sanders 
Theatre, after a performance of Beetho- 
ven's " Eroica Symphony," that, after all, 
the " Sentiment "of the funeral march was 
a little " forced." This was charming, too. 
Of course it is not great or of the great 
world. And yet I know that in Paris and 
Berlin, in Oxford and Munich, there are 
constantly arising cliques and coteries that 
go on in the same sort of exclusive way. A 
sect arises whose pursuit it is to praise Cim- 
abue or damn Handel. I knew of a French 
artist of whom great things were expected, 
who could only laugh when Michael Angelo 
was named. Michael Angelo made him 
laugh. He could do nothing but laugh. It 
was Boston's foible to set metes and bounds 
to everything : that was the game which we 
played; but it was a good game, and the 
players were among the best-hearted people 
in the world. 

Mr. Brimmer's cultivation was, as has 
been seen, not of the Bostonian brand. He 
had no pose of any kind, no ambition. His 
cultivation was unconscious. 
94 



MR. BRIMMER 

He was as much at home with a Turk as 
with an Englishman, and had the natural 
gravity which marks the Asiatic. He could, 
upon occasion, be severe and masterful ; and 
at such times his thin jaw would protrude 
beneath his falling mustache. In that age 
the wandering Englishman of fashion was 
apt to drop in upon an American dinner- 
party in his traveling jacket. One such of- 
fender Mr. Brimmer caused to ascend in the 
elevator to become arrayed in a suit from 
the antique and honorable wardrobe of the 
house, before being admitted to the feast. 
I am sure that the host spoke with the 
sweetness of King Arthur and Galahad in 
making the suggestion to the stranger. 

Mr. Brimmer's most powerful quality 
was his patience. He could endure and go 
on enduring almost to eternity. To a man 
of his delicate physique and inner sensitive- 
ness, the jolting of life must ever have been 
painful; and he seemed often to be in pain; 
but whether it was physical pain or mental 
pain was hard to guess. Of all the virtues 
the virtue of patience is most foreign to 
youth: his power of patience impressed 
me and awed me. I am quite sure that 
if I should see him again I should be 
as much at the mercy of his superiority and 
95 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

of his quietude as I was at the age of twen- 
ty-three. 

I will not attempt to describe Mr. Brim- 
mer's public activities. Everyone revered 
him and regarded him as a model citizen, 
the benefactor and manager of museums 
and colleges. I only knew his social life. 
He must always have stood by himself : he 
seemed not to belong to any of the existing 
Bostonian types. He told me that, at some 
period during the war, when the cause of 
the North looked particularly hopeless, he 
had been at a dinner where many of the 
most prominent men in Boston were gath- 
ered to consider the military situation. It 
was a formal occasion, at which men gave 
their views seriatim. He was the only man 
present who thought the war could be 
pushed to a successful issue. Perhaps in 
every generation there are solitary men, 
who live like sentinels within their own 
thoughts, watching the world. Their very 
lack of personal aim makes them significant. 
They exert an influence that is peculiarly in- 
definable. They qualify other men. 

The Brimmers had no children; but their 
household, and indeed the whole little king- 
dom that went with it, was greatly warmed 
and caused to glow by the presence of the 
96 



MR. BRIMMER 

two Italian nieces. Each of these girls 
grew up to be a remarkable woman, and died 
early, leaving a great gap behind her, and 
people looking up into heaven. I must 
speak of them in this place, however, not so 
much for their own sakes as because they 
were a part of Mr. and Mrs. Brimmer. 
They were the life of the establishment ; and 
all the horses and carriages, banquets and 
ceremonies, all the empty childless wealth of 
the Brimmer household was glorified by 
their presence. These young ladies were in 
reality only half Italian, but they looked 
wholly Italian, and they were in themselves 
thoroughly foreign. The woman of north- 
ern Europe is, after all, a washed-out affair. 
Compared to the Mediterranean woman, she 
is a drudge and a good creature merely. 
The southern woman is an independent 
spirit. In spite of the Greek theories as to 
the suppression of the sex, Phaedra, Medea 
and Sappho were as little suppressed as it is 
possible to be. They had freedom of 
thought and of conduct. Shakespeare's 
women owe their charm to this quality of 
freedom. He filched the type out of south- 
ern stories, and he dressed it in northern in- 
nocence. These two girls then, who looked 
like figures out of the Vita Nuova, brought 
97 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

with them from Italy the daring of a coun- 
try where a woman is as good as a man, 
while they inherited in their own natures 
and from their American ancestors a sort 
of Anglo-Saxon piety. They were or- 
phans, devout Protestants, much traveled, 
very good looking, rounded and spontane- 
ous, modest and yet frankly emotional, 
forthcoming and yet remote. I shall not 
forget the first time that I saw them both. 
It was at one of the great social functions 
I have spoken of and at the moment when 
the family were awaiting the arrival of the 
crowd. The girls stood before the fire- 
place, supporting the household like caria- 
tyds and moved about through the rooms 
like some new kind of nymphs; — but not 
at all like the nymphs of Diana, rather like 
nymphs of Ceres and Proserpina which the 
God Pan had let loose in Boston. 

These young girls hung garlands about 
the declining years of their aunt and uncle, 
being as devoted as daughters could have 
been ; and then they vanished, almost at the 
same time that the old people died. Thus 
the whole structure of that enchanted pal- 
ace, with its gates and gardens, its old serv- 
ants, and stately banquets, its rose bushes 
and aviaries, and with the old Knight Brim- 
98 



MR. BRIMMER 

mer and the two beautiful Italian girls, — 
seemed to fall together and disappear in a 
night. How they arose, I never knew, nor 
how they vanished. 

The following lines were written at the 
time of his death: 

The mask of life is fallen. Behold the 



man 



Such was he, and so is. How easily 
Do all the accidents of earth drop off. 
And as they fall, the Immortality 
The soul departs to, shines through the clay. 
Severe, calm, dominant : a general. — 
Frail, yet the very manifest of Power. — 
A look of life-long conquest on his brow. 
Christ Militant, Thy soldier as he lies ! 
Not for our eyes this bearing, but for Thine. 



99 



MRS. WHITMAN 



VIII 

MRS. WHITMAN 

Social talent is a true and a rare thing; 
and though it may contain some tincture of 
ambition, as talent always does, this is but 
a small part of the phenomenon. The es- 
sence of it is a reverence for the talents of 
other people, a belief in the powers of oth- 
ers, a spiritual hospitality — which discov- 
ers that other people are remarkable and 
almost makes them so by lavishing an in- 
credible faith upon their development. 

The earliest reputation that Mrs. Whit- 
man achieved was that of being an unknown 
lady from some savage town, — Baltimore, 
perhaps, — who had appeared in Boston. 
It was not many years, however, before she 
had become a center of social influence, and 
of that peculiar kind of social influence in 
which there are strands of art, idealism, — 
intellect. The reason for her enduring con- 
quest was that her chief interest always 
lay with the young. Thus the future was 
with her. 

103 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

The discovery must every day be made 
afresh that conversation is the life of liter- 
ature, and perhaps of all the fine arts. 
Writing is a sort of conventional lie, and a 
rather dangerous one. The very greatest 
men never write at all. But there is an es- 
sential truth about conversation, which is 
due to its fluid non-conclusiveness. Talk 
leaves every question open : and every ques- 
tion really is open. This is what is meant 
by the so-called " art of conversation." 
Plato knew the secret, and often resorts to 
a sort of laborious equivocation in order to 
keep life in his dialogues. The man who 
writes always wants to conclude something 
instead of being content to lay it bare. But 
ideas sprout best after they have arisen and 
have been plowed under in conversation. 
Without this, they are apt to spread with a 
sickly luxuriance into unprunable philoso- 
phy, — dogmatic, difficult and falser than 
flippancy itself. 

I have sometimes thought that one dif- 
ference between French and German liter- 
ature is that the Frenchman is always in a 
parlor ; while the German, on the other hand, 
lives in the mining-camp of his profes- 
sion. Of course there are German poets 
and novelists who deal with social life; but 
104 



MRS. WHITMAN 

the Hewers and diggers of the race are al- 
ways encroaching; they occupy history, 
they invade journalism, they set up their 
barracks around philosophy. They have 
destroyed the German language; and all 
this because they work in silence. Good 
style is founded on speech. It is a weak- 
ness in our colleges that the students are al- 
ways scribbling in the lecture rooms. The 
fountain pens should be taken from them 
at the doors of the class rooms. Exam- 
inations ought to be oral where possible, and 
nothing ought to be found on an examina- 
tion paper except what has been threshed 
out in open discussion. If we could go one 
step further and forbid the professors to 
read their remarks from manuscript, we 
should take a long stride towards the life of 
the intellect. 

It must be my excuse for this long pref- 
ace that Mrs. Whitman was one who, some- 
how, represented a rediscovery of the im- 
portance of conversation. It was the 
intrinsic nature of the woman rather than 
any special intention that led her to take the 
course she did. Clever men love to be ap- 
preciated, and when, as rarely happens, a 
woman is found with so much enthusiasm 
for intelligence that she turns a special re- 
105 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

flector upon anyone possessing it and gives 
him the shock and glow of recognition, the 
clever men will flock about her, and a sort 
of salon will arise. It was not men alone 
whom Mrs. Whitman fascinated by her 
sympathy. She subdued every sort of per- 
son, especially old ladies, especially young 
school girls, especially her own incorrupti- 
ble contemporaries, who had never known 
such a creature before, but who sooner or 
later lay in chains to her resourceful per- 
sonality. 

I remember a curious Bostonian cock- 
fight at her studio, where Professor Royce 
and Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes were 
pitted against each other to talk about the 
Infinite. Royce won, of course, — some- 
what after the manner of Gladstone, — by 
involving the subject in such adamantine 
cobwebs of voluminous rolling speculation 
that no one could regain his senses there- 
after. He not only cut the ground from 
under everyone's feet; but he pulled down 
the sun and moon, and raised up the ocean, 
and everyone was shipwrecked and took to 
small planks and cups of tea. 

Mrs. Whitman was surrounded by gen- 
iuses. I didn't always believe in the rest 
of them, but I believed that somehow I must 
106 



MRS. WHITMAN 

be a good one, — not so great as she be- 
lieved, but still something quite considera- 
ble in my own way. She had an unterri- 
fied way of dealing with social life that 
would have made her a force in any com- 
munity. If James Russell Lowell came to 
town, she would give a dinner party of 
twelve young people to meet him. He 
played up considerably upon one such occa- 
sion, though in a manner that was more his- 
torically interesting than socially pleasant. 
This was at the end of his life, when he 
wore a high hat with British obstinacy, and 
looked askance at the Common. He ex- 
actly resembled the portraits which we see 
of him on the calendars. And when some 
nice Senior from Harvard ventured to 
launch a very decent remark in his direc- 
tion, Mr. Lowell corrected his grammar 
and delivered a lecture upon the uses of 
"shall" and "will." This was "Seeing 
Boston" with a vengeance; and yet who 
would not be glad to carry about with him 
the recollection of the megaphone? 

Mrs. Whitman used, in entertaining, to 
mingle old and young together. To do this 
is the first requisite of agreeable society, 
and the only way of civilizing the younger 
generation. Wherever the practice falls 
107 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

into disuse, the boys and girls will run to 
seed as they grow up. Young people are 
naturally barbarians; and unless they are 
furnished with examples of good manners 
they soon become negligent, unashamed and 
illiterate. They forget those reserves 
which embody the traditions of centuries, 
and which add charm and intensity to so- 
cial enjoyment. They would forget read- 
ing and writing, history, clothes, the multi- 
plication table and how to tell time, if they 
were entirely abandoned by their elders. 
Well-bred older persons unconsciously dom- 
inate the imagination of the young, and in- 
form them as to many matters without ut- 
tering a word. In this way good traditions 
are preserved. The civilizing process goes 
forward in the drawing rooms of every 
country in Europe ; but in America the prac- 
tice prevails of leaving the young people to 
themselves. The consequence is that the 
children of our nicest families often behave 
as if they had never seen an educated per- 
son or entered a drawing room. The 
young savages are at Coney Island now, 
and will be at Hayti to-morrow, unless the 
custom is revived of bringing old and young 
together for the amusements of life. 

This lack of social training in our young 
108 



MRS. WHITMAN 

people is, by the way, merely a sample of 
our great national defect. If one were to 
give, in a single word, the difference be- 
tween Europe and America, the word would 
be training. What we need most in every 
department of life, — in scholarship, in sci- 
ence, in journalism, in administrative busi- 
ness and in the decorative arts, — is train- 
ing. Neither aptitude, intellect, nor ambi- 
tion; neither love nor religion is lacking to 
us. Our great need is a need of training. 

It was not through any pedagogic theory, 
however, that Mrs. Whitman was led to 
mingle old and young at her parties. She 
was devoted to the individuals that she 
asked to her house ; and that was the whole 
secret of their being there. 

There are people whose interests and af- 
fections lie in the world of personality, to 
whom the whole of life is made up of peo- 
ple. Mrs. Alice Freeman Palmer (whom I 
never met) was such a woman. Not 
thoughts, not ideas, not religions, but peo- 
ple made the universe for her ; and this gave 
her incommunicable, unimaginable access to 
people's hearts. She held the keys of them, 
— thousands of keys to thousands of indi- 
viduals, — and they each felt themselves to 
be understood when they met her ; they felt 
109 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

as it were, in contact with the power that 
made them. This sort of entry into peo- 
ple's minds Mrs. Whitman also had, though 
it was in a field of life quite different from 
Mrs. Palmer's field. Her province was 
both wider and narrower than Mrs. Pal- 
mer's. But for each of these women, peo- 
ple made up life. If you will consider 
the great permanent, practical needs of the 
world, you will see that one of them is the 
need of such focal personalities as these. 
Our University towns to-day are little Mec- 
cas for young enthusiasm. How sad is it to 
see the ignorant freshmen wandering about 
Harvard Square — and to find the same 
men again as Seniors, often wandering back 
to their distant homes, having found the 
cribs at Harvard but not having found any- 
one who could teach them how to draw 
down the fodder. Benevolence alone will 
not make a teacher, nor will learning alone 
do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar 
talent, and implies a need and a craving in 
the teacher himself. 

It would be impossible to say how much a 
whole generation, of whom I was one, owed 
to Mrs. Whitman; for her activity intro- 
duced us to one another and brought us 
forward. She would take no end of 
no 



MRS. WHITMAN 

trouble. For years after many of us had 
left Boston, upon hearing that one of us 
was to pass through the town, she would 
improvise a meeting of the twenty persons 
the visitor most desired to see there. When 
she died a whole society seemed to be sud- 
denly extinguished. Vesuvius had covered 
the town of Boston, and we went about pok- 
ing among the ashes to find each other in 
holes, corners and side streets. 

I find again and again in writing these 
memories that the most telling personalities 
I have known often, upon reflection, 
vaguely suggest tragedy. But tragedy is 
too strong a word; — perhaps renunciation 
or apparent failure would be better. The 
men and women who make the best boon 
companions seem to have given up hope of 
doing something else. They have, perhaps, 
tried to be poets and painters; they have 
tried to be actors, scientists and musicians. 
But some defect of talent or of opportunity 
has cut them off from their pet ambition, 
and has thus left them with leisure to take 
an interest in the lives of others. Your 
ambitious man is selfish. No matter how 
secret his ambition may be, it makes him 
keep his thoughts at home. He is putting 
pennies in the slot for himself every few 
in 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

moments. What sort of a man is that, 
then, to open one's heart to? He would 
be sure to advise you to take a liver-pill and 
to think no more of the matter. But the 
heartbroken people, — if I may use the 
word in a mild, benevolent sense, — the peo- 
ple whose wills are subdued to fate, give 
us consolation, recognition and welcome. 
There is nothing that we can do for such 
natures in return save to accept the situa- 
tion and be thankful. 



112 



GREEK AS A PLEASURE 



IX 

GREEK AS A PLEASURE 

I know not how it may be with other men, 
but to me, poetical translations of the Greek 
tragedians have ever been one of the disap- 
pointments and annoyances of life. The 
great reputations of the originals stand out 
as a never-dying taunt and challenge, luring 
on the adventurous soul. As he approaches 
the Greek text, these poetical versions 
pounce forward upon him, seize, bewilder, 
fatigue and out-weary him with their thou- 
sand-fold flounces and flappings of literary 
contrivance. They dance like gypsies and 
pose like models, till he retires to his tent in 
disgust — retires miles and miles away, to 
his rightful avocation, to family life, poli- 
tics and modern literature. Then again, it 
may be years later, on some fine day his at- 
tention is again caught by the looming Co- 
lossi afar off behind the huts of the prepos- 
terous scholars, and again he glances to- 
wards ^schylus, Sophocles, Euripides. 
115 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Now there is a mean, sneaking, and de- 
spised band of hackmen, who, for a few 
pence stand ready to give one a near view of 
the great figures. I mean the literal trans- 
lators, and formerly these honest villains 
would really bring one up to the great crea- 
tures and show one something of their anat- 
omy. To be sure, you were not in good 
society while with the Bohns — -you were 
not in literature, but you got a whiff and 
inkling that was of mighty interest; you 
got a Greek feeling, a gritty taste of truth ; 
you could imagine the poetic form as read- 
ily as you could imagine the theatrical set- 
ting. I have noticed with alarm in more 
recent years, a growing tendency of the uni- 
versities to suborn these useful hacks and 
to dress them in belles lettres. The varlets 
now wear shirt frills. The good old 
tramp translators are going out; and the 
Colossi are being enclosed by a syndicate of 
impenetrable literary ambition. It is a vain 
solace to remember Edward Fitzgerald and 
Gilbert Murray — and if you will, Brown- 
ing, Swinburne, Matthew Arnold and the 
other translators of genius, who have en- 
riched the English language with transfu- 
sions of amazing beauty, drawn from the 
Greek. The value of such men is a value 
116 



GREEK AS A PLEASURE 

added to modern life and to English liter- 
ature. It all tends to advertise, yet to ob- 
scure, the Greek. They are in an uncon- 
scious conspiracy to befool the world with 
new sorceries, and to enclose the oracles 
with an interpretation so dazzling and so 
engaging as to balk the curiosity of half the 
world. 

When I made this discovery, I deter- 
mined to learn Greek, or at any rate to read 
Greek by the light of every facility except 
literature — a little of it anyway — a play, 
half a play, a speech, a couplet — something 
that was in itself the thing I sought, and 
not a rendering of it. I had recourse to the 
garret of memory and there I found a small 
seedbag of moldy Greek, and with this I be- 
gan experiments. On reexamining the first 
readers and easy grammars which my whole 
generation had been put through, it seemed 
to me that they were admirable primers. 
None need be better. Then why did I not 
know Greek? The reason was that I had 
never followed up the beginnings. I had 
never read a page of Greek out of natural 
curiosity, nor had I ever seesr anyone else 
do such a thing as to read Greek for pleas- 
ure. If anyone will read ten pages of Eng- 
lish in the manner in which the schoolboy 
"7 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

is taught Greek, he will see why Greek is 
dropped by the boy as soon as possible. 
Let anyone analyze ten pages of English, 
answer grammatical questions upon it, let 
him be asked to parse and give the parts of 
irregular verbs, to distinguish between vari- 
eties of subjunctive, and he will begin to 
loathe English literature. For some deep 
psychological reason the best books to con- 
strue are often dull books. Perhaps an 
amusing book might distract the student's 
attention. Caesar's Commentaries is the 
dullest book in Latin. It is like making a 
road to read it. It is not a book; it is a 
stone-crushing machine. The teacher, a 
two-dollar-a-day man, stands beside the ma- 
chine and runs it. And this is the Classics. 
It may be asked, At what point should 
the reading for pleasure begin? It should 
begin at about the second lesson, when some 
entertaining sentence or verse should be 
learned — as the Lorelei is learned on the 
first day of German. A little of the lan- 
guage should be put in alive into the child's 
mind each day; and the grammar should 
then come behind and sweep up, and ex- 
plain ; it should be kept as a necessary uten- 
sil. This relationship should be maintained 
throughout life; and the attention should be 
118 



GREEK AS A PLEASURE 

kept on the meanings which occur in sen- 
tences and verses, rather than on the shad- 
ows of them which the grammars have 
worked out. The reason why the cart is 
put before the horse in classical education 
is that the grammarians through whose ad- 
mirable labors it is that we possess the class- 
ics at all, have always been interested in the 
cart. It has been their province to study 
out a rule; and they have interposed this 
rule between us and the language. They 
have done it with the best intentions. 

There is another circumstance which 
largely accounts for our inherited misteach- 
ing of Latin and Greek. The learned world 
has been digging out the classics for the last 
four hundred years; and the ideals of the 
learned world are accurate scholarship and 
scientific precision. It is probably right 
that the learned world should have such 
ideals — or should have had them during 
this epoch. And yet accurate scholarship 
and scientific precision are illusions in the 
case of language, and there is no scholar 
living who could write a page of Greek 
without making ludicrous errors — errors 
of the sort that the Anglo-Indian makes in 
writing English, which he has learned from 
books. If even Mr. Mackail or Gilbert 
119 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Murray or Nauck, that great, horrible 
mythic monster — should spend a whole 
day in dove-tailing phrases which they had 
fished out of Plato or Thucydides to make 
an essay of, the chances are that any Athe- 
nian would laugh five times to the page 
over the performance. 

If the whole subject were dealt with more 
lightly, if Greek were treated as, say, French 
is treated by Frenchmen and Italian by Ital- 
ians, hundreds of boys would learn Greek 
with delight and read it easily all their lives, 
progressing from the simpler authors to the 
more difficult ones as one goes from iEsop 
to Thucydides. The whole parade of accu- 
racy should be deliberately subordinated, 
and allowed to take its rank in each pupil's 
mind according to his ambition, destination 
and disposition. If a boy is going to be- 
come a teacher of Greek he must take the 
grammar seriously, but if he only wants to 
read Greek as he reads French he can get 
on with a very distant salute to many charm- 
ing questions. 

There should be a great Reader in large 
print, made up of bits and fragments — 
dotes, verses, scenes from the dramatists, 
fragments of Plutarch, Homer and Herod- 
otus. And the boys should be encouraged 
1 20 



GREEK AS A PLEASURE 

to read in this book small bits at a time, and 
easy bits first. And the teacher should be 
satisfied when the sense is understood and 
should push the boys on to read and to read, 
and not to bother about the grammar. 
Enough grammar will filter into them by de- 
grees to make them understand the construc- 
tions — and what else is grammar for ? Let 
the tutor have no ambition to make the boys 
write Greek. The desire to write Greek is 
an exotic thing. If a boy has it, let him be 
encouraged, of course; but let it not be 
forced upon the next boy. As a matter of 
fact, the best way to learn to write any lan- 
guage is to read plenty of it ; to learn frag- 
ments by heart, and fill the mind with the 
sound of it; then to write it by ear; and 
thereafter to work up the grammar in cor- 
recting what has been written. This is the 
way to learn French or German; why not 
Greek? Language is a thing of the ear, 
and is most easily learned by the ear, and 
in quantities. Let the children have more 
Greek, and ever more Greek, and let gram- 
mar and critical analysis be kept for dessert. 
When one thinks of the thousands of 
teachers who are obliged to plod year after 
year through the same portions of Xeno- 
phon and Virgil and through the same 

121 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

scenes of Homer, just because of the fear 
of the Learned World lest the boys should 
learn the wrong kind of Greek — when one 
sees the stunting of intelligence, the dead- 
ening of interest that must come from such 
a process — one does not, wonder at the de- 
cay of Greek in our universities. We have 
been doing what is hard; we ought to do 
what is easy. 

This long preface may introduce a few 
brief remarks upon the pleasure and instruc- 
tion a man may get from a language which 
he understands in an imperfect, self-taught 
way. A person who knows, or thinks he 
knows, no Latin may experience this pleas- 
ure by looking over a collection of Latin 
phrases and proverbs. His brain is fed and 
transformed by a new stimulus. No one 
need apologize for attacking the classics in 
the spirit of amateur curiosity. It was in 
this manner that Goethe read them. Nor 
need we believe that their gifts and their in- 
structions are poured out in proportion to 
the accuracy of the recipient's education in 
grammar. There are fountains which are 
closed through the study of grammar as 
well as fountains which are opened. A be- 
lief in the importance of grammar often 
acts as a grating between mind and litera- 

122 



GREEK AS A PLEASURE 

ture. There is, to be quite frank, a certain 
amount of humbug about all grammar. 
This was true in the time of Protagoras 
and Aristotle, and became more true as the 
study was more seriously pursued in the Al- 
exandrine epoch, and as the hardy scholars 
began to erect wire nettings in the window 
frames fronting the landscapes of litera- 
ture. 

The modern science of grammar, which 
is based upon a mediaeval edition of Alexan- 
drine conceptions, seems to have lost none 
of the rigidity, fussiness and conceit of the 
Alexandrine epoch. We are obliged to 
come at Greek poetry through this medium 
— which did not exist when the poetry was 
written; but which has been developed and 
added to, as one of the side products of 
Western education. Its relation to ancient 
poetry and to ancient ways of feeling grows 
falser as time goes on. In the time of the 
Greek tragedians noun and verb and ad- 
jective and conjunction, as we know them, 
existed not. Greek adjectives are half 
nouns, pronouns are voices, and might 
easily be called so; prepositions are moody, 
bat-like things, and ought probably to be 
called moods. The verbs turn into nouns 
upon the slightest provocation, and the case- 
123 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

endings attract and eat each other up with 
whimsical facility. All is done for the sen- 
timent of the ear, nothing for rule, all is 
governed by a supergrammatical instinct, 
which the modern mind can neither practice 
nor understand. All the words in Greek 
take their meanings from each other to an 
extent not easily conceivable. Their wings 
are in motion like butterflies that will not 
alight. The air is full of the petals of par- 
ticles for which we have no modern equiva- 
lents and which yet flutter and wheel with 
an inner poetry and an inimitable logic of 
their own. We were men before we were 
scholars, and therefore these things affect 
us like music. 

The grammarian, with his immense cabi- 
net of miniature surgical instruments, at- 
tacks this fairyland. He weaves about it 
a whole underworld of weird, unearthly, 
morbid wisdom. Grammar is a strange 
study which clouds the mind like opium. 
A language is invented, dark and technical, 
like mediaeval law, like mediaeval theology, 
an ontological language which moves among 
half -understood and awesome realities — 
like Dante in purgatory. It is this gloomy 
and fascinating tongue which the students 
learn — a tongue much harder than Greek, 
124 



GREEK AS A PLEASURE 

and possessing a literature many times as 
large as classical Greek literature and made 
up entirely of grammars. This cabalistic 
language is ever pushed forward by the 
scholars. 

Everything that has ever been written 
about the Classics has had its influence in 
bringing us to them. Let us accept all this 
steering with gratitude, and come into port. 
Let us shut our guidebooks, and look at the 
works and fragments of antiquity with all 
our eyes. 



125 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 



X 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

Professor Charles Eliot Norton was 
an important influence in undergraduate 
life when I was at Harvard; in some ways 
he was the most important man there. He 
took a personal interest in the student. You 
heard about Goodwin; you heard about 
Lane; but you knew Norton. Everyone 
knew him. He was an academic power of 
the first magnitude, a great individuality 
through whom the best traditions of Amer- 
ican college life were continued. He gave 
to his students not only what he knew, but 
what he was. To do this implies greatness ; 
and it is really by this kind of greatness 
that men are judged, whether they be teach- 
ers or men of action: it is this unique part 
of a man that makes his value. If we cast 
an eye back over the last half -century in 
America we shall not see so many great in- 
dividualities that we are tempted to pass 
by or forget the figure of a great professor. 
129 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Our age has been an age of management, 
not of ideas or of men. Our problems have 
been problems of transportation and hous- 
ing, not of thought. Our great men have 
been executive persons, whose merit was to 
serve the public convenience in practical 
ways. Our greatest pedagogues have gen- 
erally been mere administrators. As for 
teaching in the mystical and personal sense 
— teaching in its religious and spiritual 
meaning — we have not had time for it. 
Yet there have been a few sages even in our 
generation. Some of them have been mas- 
ters and under-masters in schools; some of 
them have been private persons — mere 
characters of eminence. Let us acknowl- 
edge our debt to these men as we should to 
a spirit; for through them we are united 
to the larger interests of humanity, and our 
children's heritage has passed through their 
devout hands. 

One of these sages was Professor Nor- 
ton. I would not call him a world sage, 
or a key to humanity at large, but a local 
sage, and a key to his own epoch. How 
well he fitted into his times may be seen in 
his immediate usefulness; and by the light 
of this hint we may study the state of cul- 
ture in the America of his day. The most 
130 




From the bust by Victor B. Brenner 

CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

powerful part of his work was not that 
which played directly on the great public 
through his writings ; it lay in his enormous 
influence over the youth who sat under him ; 
and his image as it rises out of the past car- 
ries inspiration to professors everywhere. 
He was a man of much complexity of dis- 
position, and it is impossible for anyone 
to give a true account of him who knew him 
as slightly as I did. But I will tell my im- 
pressions of him — both the earlier ones 
and the modifications of them which came 
about through time. For, as Norton grew 
older, the core of him began to shine 
through its coverings; and at the age of 
eighty he was plainly nothing else than a 
darling old saint, with a few sophistical hob- 
bies which, when you went to see him, he 
drew from his cabinet and showed you with 
glee — old philosophical gimcracks. These 
things you perceived at once to be of no 
importance ; while the man himself was 
everything. 

In 1880 he was a man of fifty-three whose 
face showed immense character. He had 
the stoop of the student, the measured, ac- 
curate speech of the New England man of 
letters, a manner of speech, indeed, which 
betrayed all things at a clap. It betrayed 
131 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

early piety, later skepticism, the interest of 
the amateur in the fine arts, consciousness of 
caste, immense force of character, and a 
fundamental goodness. His speech both 
betrayed and concealed a personal feeling 
of interest and kindliness, a real unselfish- 
ness and power of sacrifice which was the 
mainspring of his life and was the cause of 
its immense utility. 

Yet in spite of his forthcoming quality 
there was in Norton something that balked. 
If Goethe could say of Schiller that he was 
like a camel, I may be permitted to say of 
Norton that even his greatest admirer or 
best friend felt in him an element of mulish- 
ness which nothing could quell or guide save 
the power that made him. He was not a 
bad mule; he was good; but you felt that 
he was putting his feet down somewhere 
and was prepared to resist. Even before 
you spoke you received an ultimatum. 

This was merely the vestibule of Norton. 
Many people never got beyond this vesti- 
bule; but turned away resentfully from the 
polite, sardonic, patronizing smile of the 
host, and from the assumption that there 
was a sanctuary somewhere hidden within 
the house. They left him standing with the 
doorknob in his hand. Many men remem- 
132 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

bered this vestibule all their lives thereafter, 
and could never speak peaceably of Norton. 
Those who pushed forward boldly, how- 
ever, and came to close quarters and even to 
hard knocks, liked Norton. They found 
frankness behind his sophistication, reli- 
gion behind his irreligion, and bonhomie 
behind his crudeness. 

Norton's sense that he had a mission 
probably arose out of his clerical caste, and 
from the strong aristocratic feeling of those 
old Puritan first-families, who felt that they 
must be leaders in Israel. And he did have 
a mission too, though his mission was of a 
humbler sort than his exterior proclaimed; 
and his function more closely resembled 
that of an expert librarian than that of a 
Taoist priest. With regard to Norton's 
original piety and its transformation into a 
militant skepticism, — the tradition was that 
he had been, in his earliest years, the perfect 
young saint of Unitarianism ; but that con- 
tact with freethinkers during a visit to Eng- 
land, and the loss of his young wife had up- 
set his faith. The sense of his vocation, 
however, survived the change in his faith, 
as so often happens; and a slight hostility 
to Christianity thereafter tinged his mind. 
i33 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

These things, however, had happened in the 
dark ages, long before I was in College. 

At the time I first knew him he was a 
widower, and his many children surrounded 
his board and filled his comfortable old 
mansion at Shady Hill. To this home he 
brought many a student for dinner or for 
supper with the family. There was noth- 
ing he would not do in the way of opening 
books, and of showing objects and inducing 
his children and his young guests to talk 
upon literature and on the topics of the day. 
The household itself made a happy picture, 
and one of Norton's passions was to fill his 
house with the poor and the needy. On 
Christmas Day he made of Shady Hill a 
refuge for all the students who came from 
such distances that they could not go home 
for the holidays. But Cambridge was not 
Norton's only home. He had a country 
house at Ashfield, Massachusetts, and in 
this community he made of himself a village 
sachem, a friend of the country-folk. 
There was held at Ashfield a yearly harvest- 
home feast at which he used to preside and 
George William Curtis and other worthies 
used to make speeches. It was a charming 
and a sincere celebration, and showed that 
134 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

rarest of all phenomena in America, the re- 
lation of the man of intellect to the soil. 
He did these things in the aristocratic man- 
ner. Indeed, he was a grand exemplar of 
a dignified and ancient race. If he stopped 
to talk to an old neighbor in the country, 
it was with the graciousness of a prince; 
if he gave a lecture before the audience of 
a rural lyceum, he distributed his thoughts 
like largess. Behind his aristocracy of 
breeding, moreover, there was manhood, 
sincerity, good feeling, — the instinct of hu- 
man solidarity. 

We all know what solidarity of innate 
power arises out of the family feeling of 
class and county. Tiny nations and small 
cities have had it. It is the foundation of 
art and of character. It is the invisible arm 
behind the stroke of wit. It stages intel- 
lect and makes every man speak with the 
voice of a nation. Without this reservoir 
of sentiment behind and above him a man 
is a bag of clothes and his personality is tin- 
sel. The constant change of habitat of men 
in this country, and our jumble of national- 
ities, is like the tossing of the Persian 
princes in a blanket: it makes men aliens 
and non-conductors; they die for lack of 
rest in one another. 

135 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES ■ 

Norton knew or felt this and he fastened 
himself to the ground by such anchors as 
he had inherited or had forged for himself. 
This instinct was part of the strong side of 
him and it coexisted, as we shall see later, 
with a habit of caviling at his own nation, 
as if he were some sort of foreign-born 
macaroni. To do this, however, is a hu- 
man foible to which any man may fall a 
victim. I had a classmate at college who 
had never been far from South Boston, and 
one evening while dancing at the Dorches- 
ter Assembly he slipped and fell to the 
ground. He arose at once with great 
aplomb, remarking, coldly, " These cursed 
American floors ! " 

Esthetically Norton was weak; he had 
the stiff New England brain which (nat- 
urally) had never come in contact with the 
fine arts in childhood, but had learned them 
as a grown man learns French. He was 
thus in the position of a demonstrator or 
magician in regard to all the subjects which 
became the passion of his life. He han- 
dled these subjects well; he was not a part 
of them. Most of us occupy the same 
somewhat tragic relation to the plastic arts, 
and we have grown astute to discount our 
own impressions and to remember the com- 
136 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

plexities of the matter. The American 
scholar of to-day is modest about Italy. But 
the pioneer American scholar who discov- 
ered the fine arts and returned to America 
from a North Pole expedition to Italy, 
where he had found them and staked them 
out — could not know his own limitations. 
It always requires a long time for a young 
nation to become initiated into the fine arts. 

Before settling down at Harvard, Nor- 
ton had not only discovered the fine arts in 
Italy, but he had fallen in with that brave 
band of Britishers who had also discovered 
the fine arts (especially the fifteenth cen- 
tury), and he became a friend of Ruskin, 
and of all those extremely purposeful, ar- 
tistic, and literary English people — the pre- 
Raphaelites. It was a band or gang that 
he joined in England. That was the 
trouble with it — it was a movement. Nor- 
ton stood toward this group of men in the 
position of a satellite — so strongly marked 
was the division in him between a powerful 
moral nature (which was never satellite to 
anything or to anybody) and a slightly 
flimsy esthetic understanding, which in 
early manhood had fettered him to this 
school. 

It was probably this scholastic attitude 
137 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

which offended the young and not unself- 
conscious student who accepted the hospital- 
ities of Shady Hill, yet winced under the 
powerful preciosity of its master. There 
was something in all the members of the 
Boston Clique of Letters which at the age 
of twenty I deeply resented. With the ex- 
ception of Holmes (for Emerson did not 
belong to Boston), the Boston Pundits had 
a pose. I rather believe that all literary sets 
have a pose, just as actors often have; and 
to persons who know the world a pose is a 
pardonable weakness. But the pose of the 
litterateur appears to the very young person 
to be case-hardened and supercilious. Pro- 
fessor Norton was particularly kind to me 
and often asked me to his home; and yet 
I did not more than half like him. If he 
handed you a curio or a remark, it was done 
with the assumption that he knew more 
about such things than you could ever 
know. He had that false relation to the 
things of the mind — you might call it the 
Platonic relation, for Plato is the greatest 
exponent of it — a relation which assumed 
that they were playthings and that he knew 
the game. 

The man who dealt with ideas in this pat- 
ronizing manner was no mere dilettante, 
138 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

He was a patriot whose health had disqual- 
ified him for military service, but who had 
served his country throughout the war in 
the arduous, obscure, and useful work of- 
the Loyal Publication Society. He was a 
whole-hearted man whose devotion to his 
friends, whose public spirit, whose recti- 
tude and simplicity of life, ranked him with 
the Good Man of the Psalms and with the 
Staunch Citizen of Horace. 

Everything that Norton did had a certain 
natural force in it. He belonged to the 
Puritan race and was first cousin to Presi- 
dent Eliot. He shared with Eliot a pity for 
the poor, an extreme tenderness and good- 
ness toward poor students. He shared with 
Eliot an incorruptible obtuseness as toward 
things unborn — things creative, poetic, and 
of the temperament. In fact, he was very 
like Eliot. He resembled Eliot in his ef- 
fectiveness; and — since I have put it off 
till now — I must say that Norton's life- 
work consisted in making the unlettered, 
rough youth of America understand that 
there were such things as architecture, paint- 
ing, and sculpture. Norton could do this 
on a grand scale, to two hundred men at 
once ; he did it as a giant crane-shovel digs 
the Panama Canal. He did it with great 
139 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

strokes of natural power, often with tears 
in his eyes, sometimes with sarcasm, some- 
times dogmatically, but always successfully. 
More men have told me what Norton did 
for them in opening their understanding to 
the influence of art than have ever spoken 
to me of all the rest of Harvard's profes- 
sors put together. 

It was strange to see doctrine which — 
intellectually speaking — was a thin wash 
of estheticism, being ladled out like hot sal- 
vation to the hungry and shivering youth of 
America. Yet the sincerity on both sides 
was perfect, and the needs both of the giver 
and of the receivers of the doctrine were 
satisfied. It was only equality that Norton 
did not understand ; to suppliants he was as 
sweet as summer. 

He had another quality which combined 
oddly enough with his zeal. He loved to 
tease; he was naughty. He liked to use 
his skepticism in religious matters as a prod 
to excite conventional-minded persons; he 
liked to make disparaging remarks about his 
countrymen and about their all-too-obvious 
deficiencies. The enjoyment of a notoriety 
which came out of these smart sayings and 
old-maidish whimsicalities of opinion must 
be classed as a weakness in Norton; but it 
140 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

must also be classed as a trifle. His social 
contemporaries were apt to have a sneer for 
him, because from his early youth he had 
gone his own gait and followed the bent of 
his own character and talents. The most 
famous of these jibes deserves to be re- 
corded for its own sake. A college-mate of 
Norton's while traveling in Italy wrote 
home to a friend, " At Florence I ran across 
Charles Norton — sowing his tame oats/' 
It seems to me now that the idiosyncrasies 
of such a man (especially in America) are 
in themselves a blessing to his generation; 
or, at any rate, that all of Norton's foibles 
were as nothing compared with his merits. 
In England and France people take pride in 
the mental nodosities of their great men; 
people know that character and eccentricity 
go together. At the time I first knew him 
Norton was often designedly irritating; and 
it required more philosophy than most 
Americans are masters of to forgive him 
for his sallies. 

As for Norton's yeoman's work in trans- 
lating Dante, in writing memoirs of his 
friends, in editing letters, in providing pref- 
aces for many kinds of works, in being an 
accurate scholar and faithful slave to good 
literature, I think no one can deny that his 
141 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

times are in debt to him. He was one of 
our best men in those fields of work. Here, 
too, in editing and writing (as in teaching), 
he had a genius for utility. He regarded 
himself as a useful drudge, and up to his 
very last hours he was engaged in serving 
the cause of sound scholarship to the utmost 
of his power. 

During his last years he lost all his acidity 
and he retained all his affectionateness. He 
must have found out that his earlier exclu- 
siveness and pose of cultivation were not 
worth keeping up, for they dropped from 
off him, and left him rosy. He was a beam- 
ing little old gentleman with a note as sweet 
as an eighteenth-century organ — such an 
organ as you find in the hallway of an Eng- 
lish country house — mellow, gentle, and 
touching in the extreme. He remembered 
his scholars and welcomed them back; he 
always made time to see them, and he really 
became beautiful as a picture and a pres- 
ence. Happy are they who have him to look 
back upon in their lives. 

One of Professor Norton* s latest labors 
was the preparation of that series of Heart 
of Oak Readers for school children which 
have made the work of the schoolmaster 
easy. This graduated series of readers re- 
142 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

minds one by its perfection of those French 
text books containing morceau choisis, in 
which the talent and industry of a lifetime 
and the extended range of a learned man's 
mind have been employed in choosing ex- 
tracts for children to study. You think you 
are reading a book of stray passages ; yet so 
subtly are the pieces chosen for their his- 
toric interest, for their emotional appeal, for 
their poetic merit, that you are really being 
played upon at first hand by master minds 
of literature. . 

Men's characters come to us from their 
graves. For life is dazzling and complex: 
we cannot grasp it, we never understand the 
heart-in-action. But when the heart has 
stopped beating forever we turn to the lamp 
and the manuscript. Some artist pulls aside 
a curtain and shows us the man. He be- 
comes better known to posterity than he was 
to his intimate friends. If we could know 
the living as we know the dead, and meet 
them in that realm of the intellect in which 
we find their pictures, memoirs and souls' 
histories, human intercourse would be tinged 
with perpetual romance. I can, for in- 
stance, at this moment, feel how Norton in 
his later years would have been amused at 
the descriptions of his more crabbed period. 
i43 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

He would have laughed at the tale of his 
own foibles. Nay further, it is plain that 
upon very little provocation he would have 
laughed at himself at any time during his 
life. Thus in taking a telescopic view back- 
ward through a man's whole life, we may 
catch for a moment, a glimpse of what no 
one could guess who saw only a part. At 
the time events are happening they are 
dumb ; and refuse to give up their meaning. 
But afterwards they begin to give out 
thoughts and half-thoughts in flashes. 

How impossible is it to predict which of 
two young men has the main talent — 
which of them will end by establishing 
himself and forcing his times to accept him. 
The greatest talent of all is a talent for life; 
and this often lies hidden under a mound of 
golden inertia, or of frivolity and incom- 
petence, and is brought to the surface by 
those slow upheavals which run through the 
world and bring the slow men to the top. 
When I look at a row of little boys I often 
wonder which one of them it is who is hid- 
denly in touch with the enduring powers of 
the world, and how they will each look forty 
years later. There seems to exist no key to 
these enigmas. The dunces of genius and 
the real dunces look very much alike; and 
144 



CHARLES ELIOT NORTON 

boys of brilliant promise cannot be prophet- 
ically classified. 

Professor Norton was certainly a man of 
long wind and endurance; and he lived to 
impress himself and establish himself, to 
survive and continue till he appeared to be 
one of the chariot- wheels of society, and his 
whole life seems like a triumph. 



145 



ETHICAL CULTURE 



XI 

ETHICAL CULTURE 1 

Among all the changes of creeds and of 
customs, there are in any society always two 
types of men. There is the man of good 
conduct, whose life illustrates moral truth, 
and there is the religious person who con- 
sciously experiences moral truth. Even in 
ancient Egypt or in ancient Rome these 
types must have existed — the ethical per- 
son and the religious person. And if we 
were forced to choose between them we 
should prefer the man of conduct to the 
man of feeling. We reverence the good 
man who is not interested in religion more 
than the religious person who is not good; 
and in so doing we cast a doubt upon all 
dogmatic formulations of truth. There is 

1 This address was delivered in a course (before 
the Ethical Culture Society in New York) where 
each lecturer assigned some book to be read in con- 
nection with the lecture. The New Testament was 
the book recommended. 

149 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

something in religion which can only be ex- 
pressed through conduct. This is the rea- 
son for parables, which are mere pictures of 
conduct, and leave the mysteries of faith 
unsolved. We may consider ethics as life 
in the round, or as religion in practice. 
The distinction is convenient, but not ulti- 
mate. It is easy to see that ethical conduct 
must somehow be a form of religion. Any 
statement of ethical truth comes into com- 
petition with religion. Your Ethical So- 
ciety, for instance, treads on the toes of the 
churches. The teaching that goes on in 
this building is, in a sense, religious teach- 
ing. By calling it ethical you do not pre- 
vent it from being a branch and form of 
religion. 

Ethics is separated from religion very 
much as the churches are separated from 
one another — by wavy lines of prejudice 
and education. It is with these lines that 
we have to do. It is they that rule our 
philosophy; I do not say that they rule our 
lives so much as they rule our statements. 
There is a realm of discussion, and it is in 
this realm of dissension that words be- 
come important. Words are powers — like 
water power and electricity; and we find 
them running and circulating about the 
150 



ETHICAL CULTURE 

world with natures and meanings of their 
own which we cannot control. History has 
determined the matter and has bound us up 
as with chains in the meanings of these crea- 
tures, words. For instance, anyone to-day 
who uses the word God is talking Hebrew, 
not the Hebrew of Palestine, but that He- 
brew of modern accent, with two thousand 
years of Western Christianity in its voice. 
You cannot wash the significance out of the 
word nor cast another meaning upon it, 
though you speak with the tongue of genius. 
The quandary of the scholar becomes very 
apparent when he translates the Greek and 
Roman classics. In this case the modern 
writer has difficulty in attributing to the 
pagan gods the right kind of divinity. 
When he uses the God with a capital G in 
depicting classic mythology, he not only 
gives us a qualm on behalf of Jehovah, but 
he does a refined kind of violence to the 
pagan myth. He owes two apologies. 

Symbols mean so much, and become so 
identified with particular causes that we fear 
to use them. The thing we are afraid of 
is lest they shall use us. Every man I meet 
is afraid of a different kind of a surplice. 
Some dread gestures, as implying they know 
not what of dogma or claim. To bow at 
151 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

the creed or not to bow gives equally sin- 
cere shivers to opposing classes of persons, 
who in dress, food, and moral code are in- 
distinguishable. How explain these laby- 
rinthine antipathies, this deadly war of ma- 
sonic signs and murderous shibboleths? 
Each one of them must for explanation 
be looked up historically. Each one 
of them has a most simple explanation 
— an explanation in fact. Some disagree- 
able episode is at the back of each and 
every ebullition of sentiment. These ran- 
cors are the fumes of old controversy. 
We are still carrying on the animosi- 
ties of the wars of religion. The Refor- 
mation is still in progress. The smell 
of incense continues for generation after 
generation to arouse the strongest animosi- 
ties known to human nature. The Gothic 
Church may crumble, but the sentiment of 
hostility to all it once typified endures. So 
also the counter sentiment of attachment to 
it and hatred of the Reformer endure. If 
I am a Roman Catholic I may not sing 
" Lead, kindly Light " till after Newman's 
conversion. To do so might imply some- 
thing that I do not mean. Thus are we 
all slaves to formula, and slaves to the fear 
of formula — slaves as it were to history. 
152 



ETHICAL CULTURE 

Thoughts like these passed through my 
mind as I left this building the last time I 
was in it. The occasion was about a year 
ago. I had come here to attend a lecture of 
one of your foremost teachers — one of the 
pillars of the Ethical Society, and one of 
the most notable saints in the city. This 
man was lecturing to young men on Epicte- 
tus. It was a strange academy — a kind of 
mad tea-party. The students were most of 
them muscular young Hebrews, with an im- 
mense reverence for their instructor's char- 
acter and a marked skepticism as to his 
modes of reasoning. Not one in the room 
— myself least of all — knew anything 
about Epictetus. The system of in- 
struction was as follows : — The master read 
a few sentences out of Epictetus, and then 
asked a question of the nearest Hebrew. 
If the teacher did not like the answer he re- 
ceived — and he never did like it — he flung 
the young Hercules to the ground and 
pounded his head with the volume till the 
boy cried for mercy. Then he patted the 
boy's shoulder, gave him an affectionate 
hug, the protagonists took their places 
again, and the seance was resumed. At 
times the contagion of argument spread, 
and the whole class fell upon the floor in 
i53 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

melee, while Epictetus scored a touch-down. 
At the end of the lesson we were not 
fatigued, but exhilarated. It was good to 
have been there. These boys went home 
stirred and filled with vitality. I under- 
stood why it was that the Ethical Society 
was one of the religious bodies which con- 
stantly sends forth young men into prac- 
tical reform work. 

During the conference I kept muttering 
to myself from time to time, " Why Epicte- 
tus?" You see I was trying to fix my 
mind on Epictetus and to remember who he 
was. Of course some word was mentioned 
now and then about morality and religion, 
duty, service, and so forth; but I could not 
seize or identify these flying thoughts. I 
knew that I had read about all these things 
somewhere before, but I could not remem- 
ber where it was. At last my eye caught 
sight of a small gray volume, which did not 
look like a book, but like — like an object, 
a clothes-brush perhaps. It was a little 
hotel Bible, which was part of the furniture 
of the room, but which had not been noticed 
or mentioned during the proceedings. It 
seemed to be shrinking and fading away. 
I picked it up. It was quite illegible and 
had never been legible. No wonder the vol- 
i54 



ETHICAL CULTURE 

ume had never been opened. Yet it was 
there — a Bible. There in that little wizened 
package lay the great Hebrew mind, the 
only mind that is worthy to be called mind 
at all, so far as Ethics goes, the fountain 
of all enduring ethical thought, the source 
of all enduring ethical power. There lay 
the ABC of Western religion, if one de- 
sired the historic view; there the symbols 
of living ethical faith — that faith which 
is the nearest one we could reach if we 
threw a stone out of the window. I am 
speaking of the whole Bible, the Hebrew 
contribution to the world, the Old and New 
Testaments as a single body of thought. 
For the philosophic content and the mode 
of looking at life is the same in all parts 
of Jewish literature. It is impossible to 
understand the New Testament except 
through the Old, and vice versa. 

In the class-rooms of the Ethical Society 
the Bible seemed to be a thing aloof — per- 
haps a delicate subject. Why was this? 
Because Christ was rejected by the Jews 
two thousand years ago, and because Christ 
said many things that people have since 
disagreed about. The prejudices of the 
Ethical Society are easily explained. It 
was founded in the nineteenth century, 
155 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

chiefly by Hebrews, and in order to rescue 
ethical truth from the clutches of dogma 
— the dogmas of Western Christianity and 
Western Judaism. The clouds that hung 
about its birth trouble the manhood of the 
Society. The same thing is true of the 
Protestant Episcopal Church. The same 
thing is true of all churches and of all in- 
stitutions : their origins limit their influence. 
Their origins live along with them and 
cramp their mind. 

The Ethical Society was to have been 
pure intellect, and lo, it is almost as full of 
prejudices as the next religious body. This 
is no one's fault; it is a process in human 
affairs. 

I will tell you another anecdote which il- 
lustrates the reverse action of Ethical force, 
that is to say, it illustrates how benevolence 
is able to make use of all sorts of creeds, 
races, and dogmas without causing any 
trouble. The story is also about Jews. A 
very important Hebrew in Chicago, a man 
of great benevolence and vast wealth, 
wanted to help the Southern negroes. He 
got the negro question on the brain. He 
found by consulting with the best authori- 
ties that the most valuable thing he could 
do for the negroes was to raise the char- 
156 



ETHICAL CULTURE 

acter of the white men at the South. One 
way of doing this was through the 
Y.M.C.A. So then this Hebrew of the He- 
brews subscribes enormous sums to found 
white Christian Associations (from which 
negroes are excluded) as his best way of 
reaching negro conditions. It required the 
discovery of America to provide a field 
which should show up phenomena of this 
kind. The real forces of goodness and bad- 
ness run right through every person and 
every institution, and the notion of segre- 
gating truth into churches, schools, and 
theories is becoming visibly more absurd as 
the years go by. 

There is no doubt that humanity is held 
apart by dogmas and statements of truth, 
by attempts to define truth. Humanity is 
drawn together by warm-hearted conduct. 
And yet the conduct we approve often rests 
upon dogmas which we do not approve. 
The dogmas then are as important as the 
conduct. While reasoned and sensible 
statements of Ethical truth seem well 
enough for a certain class of minds, there 
are great realms of power where Ethics 
does not run. Nay, if you examine closely 
you will find that these sensible statements 
are always criticisms and qualified accept- 
157 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

ances of religious truth. They are finger- 
posts pointing to religion. 

Moral truth is born in the form of reli- 
gion. Afterwards comes ethical theory 
and rakes in the ashes for precepts. You 
cannot run the Salvation Army upon Ethi- 
cal statements, nor abolish Slavery through 
Ethical Culture. The movement would 
have to be heated and vaporized into steam 
power before its blows would tell. In the 
process God would be discovered. Pure 
Ethics has a weak voice. She has no poets 
of high rank, no prophets with heart-cleav- 
ing words. She is a handmaid, a note at 
the bottom of another's text. Ethics has a 
weak voice, it is true, and has said little of 
importance to humanity or about humanity ; 
but she has a strong hand and has done 
much for humanity. She sometimes saves 
the fragments where theologies clash and 
hope to destroy one another. But let me 
tell you my belief. Without Theology she 
would perish, for Ethics is a feeble plant, 
hardly self -perpetuating. Ethics must 
draw constant life from religion — and 
ever new life from new religion, or it be- 
comes a husk, and humanity discards it. 

If these things are true, then your Eth- 
ical Society must live by becoming to some 
158 



ETHICAL CULTURE 

extent a Theological Institute. Nay, it is 
one already. Your programme this win- 
ter shows eighteen meetings of which the 
subjects have been announced. Ten con- 
cern Robert Browning; one is on Dante. 
Now Browning and Dante are pure Theol- 
ogy. Thus Ethical theory camps out on 
the abandoned farms of Theology. 

The thing I would say to you young peo- 
ple is this: Pursue the road you are in. 
Follow the stream to its source. Read 
Browning and Dante and Milton and then 
go to the source of them, which is the New 
Testament, and read that. Read it not 
merely for Ethics, but unreservedly for all 
that comes out of it. If Theology comes 
to you out of it — and it will — accept it, 
and have no fear of it. The fear men have 
of Theology is due to the political abuses of 
the past. We go on trembling at the robe, 
after the tyrant is dead. Some people fear 
candles on an altar. There is no harm in 
candles. If you light candles each one of 
you on the altar of his own heart, there will 
be more light in the world. 

Those dim poets, Dante and Browning, 

shed a light and show a sort of beam out of 

the infinite; but you must be a beam in 

yourself, and not fear the glow and heat 

i59 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

that may come from a deeper understanding 
of life — when it begins to reach you from 
behind the poets. 

There has recently been an age of ag- 
nosticism: it is closing. An age of faith 
is in progress. The Desert of Agnosticism 
has been crossed; and some of those lead- 
ers who helped multitudes to pass across it, 
were destined not to enter the promised land 
themselves. Such men are ever among the 
greatest of their generation. I am think- 
ing of William James, who was in himself 
more than he either saw or thought. At 
the time he was writing I saw in him only 
the ineffectual thinker, but later I came to 
see in him the saint. The fear with which 
his mind was tinctured was the very vice of 
which I should accuse the Ethical Society 
— a fear of the symbols of religion. His 
heart had been a little seared by early ter- 
ror. The intellectual part of him was en- 
feebled by the agnosticism of 1870. And 
yet what difference did it make ? Some sort 
of light shone out of his cloud as he took 
his way across the sands, and men followed 
him. I speak of him here, because his life 
is a type of mystery. He is there before 
us, but he can no more be grasped than a 
phantom. 

160 



ETHICAL CULTURE 

We also, in like manner, are mysteries, 
and our words, deeds, and notions are 
merely phantoms. Behind each one there 
is something which others see better than 
the man himself sees. The controlling ele- 
ment in our lives is unknown to us. All 
our language is personal; we cannot hand 
our faith to another. This has always 
been true. Even in the Middle Ages when 
faith was theoretically uniform it was al- 
ways practically individual. Every mind 
has a law of its own. The idiom of it is 
formed slowly in each one of us and must 
be waited for patiently. You must not ac- 
cept another man's terms of thought or 
sacrifice the integrity of your mind at any 
time. It may be that you are not destined 
to experience religion. Very well, accept 
this destiny; acceptance is the beginning 
as it is the end of religion. We must each 
walk our own path and move in that direc- 
tion where glimmers the dawn — or what 
looks like the dawn leaving the rationale of 
our conduct to the outcome. By following 
our inner feeling, no matter how quaintly 
it may express itself, or how remote it may 
seem from the usual modes of expression, 
we shall set ourselves on the road towards 
the great discoveries. I say, accept your 
161 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

powerlessness and accept your peculiarities. 
There was no one ever exactly like you. 
No wonder, then, that other people's state- 
ments mean little to you. Those state- 
ments may hereafter come to mean 
something, by looming up behind the things 
that have been revealed to you through 
your own conduct. All the great temples 
have been dedicated to this same inner God, 
and have been builded in this silence. The 
secret of the heart — a thing personal and 
intimate — being expressed, stated perhaps 
with diffidence, turns out to be the great 
lamp of truth, an axis on which human life 
turns, and has ever turned. 

The New Testament is the Thesaurus of 
sacred wisdom compared to which there is 
no book or monument that deserves to be 
named. It is a personal record and con- 
tains things — one might say — almost too 
personal to be published. Of this nature 
is its importance, and from this source — 
neither from Church nor from commenta- 
tor — flows its power. 



162 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 



XII 

PRESIDENT ELIOT 

For half a century President Eliot was 
one of the great personal figures in Amer- 
ican life. He was known to every man in 
America and to many people in Europe. 
Everyone has an interest in such a charac- 
ter; especially in America, where men are 
too much alike and great individuals are a 
rarity. Every one of us bears a relation 
of some sort to any great character who has 
lived in the immediate past. This must be 
my excuse for setting down a few remarks 
and hair-brained reminiscences which recall 
President Eliot to my mind. Many of 
them are, perhaps, links in my own history 
rather than in his. 

There is another good reason for writing 
about Eliot. He was not a political figure, 
nor an artist, nor a thinker : he was the em- 
bodiment of a mood of the American peo- 
ple, a sincere, important, and yet passing 
mood : and he belongs to a class of men who 
165 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

fill a great place in the public eye and are 
suddenly and ungratefully forgotten; — 
the class of worthies. Twenty-five years 
from now, young men will be shamelessly 
asking, " Who was President Eliot ? " And 
therefore many monographs and sketches 
of him ought to be written at once. 

Eliot's prominence is connected with the 
rise of the new education, that system or 
that blind battling" for light, which began in 
America during the seventies, when the 
opinion prevailed that the commercial 
growth of the United States, — our growth 
in population and in wealth, — 'Compelled 
the pulling down of the old buildings and 
old curricula, and the making of all things 
anew. I have heard William James say, 
" Yes, yes, we must have large things first, 
size first; the rest will come." This was 
the unspoken philosophy, the inner com- 
pelling, dumb thought of the epoch; and 
Eliot, when he was chosen President of 
Harvard in 1870, dedicated his life to the 
idea. He was shouldering, as it turned 
out, not only Harvard College but the 
higher education of the whole country. 
Before his day no one used to ask who was 
President of Harvard University. At the 
close of his day the President of Harvard 
166 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

was a national figure, and the Presidents 
of all the other Colleges in the country were 
persons to be reckoned with. Let us not, 
however, credit too much to any one man. 
Transformations in the popular imagination 
use men, choose figure-heads, subdue indi- 
viduals to their will. Eliot was the non- 
pareil schoolmaster to his age, — an age that 
worshiped the schoolmaster and clung to 
him. The recent rise of Woodrow Wilson 
in political life is connected with the same 
deep educational impulse. 

I will begin by recalling a few of the so- 
cial conditions in Cambridge thirty years 
ago; for while such matters seem to be su- 
perficial, they really result from causes that 
are deep and old, causes of national signifi- 
cance. 

In my undergraduate days (1880- 1884) 
there was a tacit understanding at Harvard 
that social intercourse between the faculty 
and the students was bad form. Louis 
Dyer was at that time a young assistant pro- 
fessor, and he had either been to Oxford, or 
else he had read about Oxford. He held 
the belief that it was well for the boys to 
meet the tutors and professors ; and he used 
to give smoking-parties in his room and to 
make himself personally agreeable to the 
167 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

students. The boys thought this a clumsy 
sort of joke, and the College authorities 
thought it — I don't know what — but they 
soon stamped him out; and he went abroad 
and afterwards lived for many years in Ox- 
ford, beloved by all, surrounded by the aca- 
demic atmosphere which he had once fool- 
ishly tried to improvise at Harvard. I have 
often thought of Dyer, and of his gentle- 
ness, and of the way he blew the cigarette 
smoke out of his nose. He was a little like 
one of those mild mythological animals in 
"Alice in Wonderland," sweet as summer, 
and, as it were, harmless, — in fact, a crea- 
ture that presented a strange contrast to the 
cynical professors and the brute students at 
Harvard College. He faded away with his 
charming grin and, by good luck, I saw him 
again at Oxford twenty-five years later, a 
few weeks before his death. Louis Dyer 
represented the " false dawn " of the social 
idea at Harvard. This idea was vigorously 
carried out by the authorities a few years 
later when they made the discovery that 
something was wrong at Harvard, that no- 
body loved anybody there, and that the 
thing to do was to give weekly teas at 
Brook's Hall, to ask everyone, to get la- 
dies from Boston, Bishops from anywhere, 
168 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

social people at any cost, social talent to 
bridge the gulf between instructors and in- 
structed. Nobly they labored. It was 
shoulder-to-shoulder, never say die, love 
one love all, more tea, more ladies. The 
whole movement was sincere in the extreme ; 
it was a real dawn, somewhat grotesque 
and naive, — (as if Phoebus should take 
down the shutters, and Aurora bang the 
doors open and proclaim the day ;) but Har- 
vard has been a more human place ever 
since. Indeed, what Harvard truly needed 
was the outside world, — ladies, Bishops 
and tea. Perhaps all institutions need 
these same things. 

There was one comic element about this 
social revival at Harvard, — viz., the flying- 
wedge endeavor to make out that President 
Eliot had been Phoebus all along, and was 
standing effulgent with social love in his 
heart, loving the boys, encouraging the pro- 
fessors, shedding influence. Now as a 
matter of fact, President Eliot was the 
spiritual father of the glacial era thereto- 
fore in progress, he was the figure-head of 
those previous dreadful times; and I have 
sometimes stopped to shake hands with him 
because I thought it was right ; — and also, 
I confess, because I thought it would cause 
169 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

him pain. Such is the silliness of the un- 
dergraduate mind. The trustees, the ladies, 
bishops and steerers of Harvard, having 
received new warmth themselves from what 
Milton calls the " mellowing year," got at 
President Eliot and thawed him out. They 
told him he was the best fellow in the 
world, they told the world that he had a 
heart of gold and was a misunderstood 
person; — and the thing was done. Pres- 
ident Eliot responded to the treatment; he 
glowed, he beamed. He really did have a 
warm place in him, and they moved this 
round in front where people could see it 
and feel it; and, by Jove, the New Legend 
was launched. 

There was something in this legend, too. 
Besides the warmth that comes from suc- 
cess and from middle-life, there had always 
been more geniality in Eliot than most peo- 
ple supposed. If the same process of in- 
caloration that Eliot received from his 
friends could have been applied to Emer- 
son, to Hawthorne, and to James Russell 
Lowell, they would have glowed also. In- 
deed, while Lowell was in England where 
he was properly petted, he grew forthcom- 
ing and hearty, — qualities he soon lost 
upon returning to America and experienc- 
170 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

ing the formal and reverential manners of 
his compatriots. I make no doubt that 
George Ticknor, Robert C. Winthrop, John 
Quincy Adams, yes, Edward Everett him- 
self would have turned a rosy hue and put 
forth green branches if they could have 
been x-rayed with warm social feeling, 
coming from a hot source of divine love. 
But such a thing was not known in their 
day. I have an instinctive suspicion that 
it was Alice Freeman Palmer who intro- 
duced this elemental heat into Boston in the 
late eighties, but upon this subject I am im- 
perfectly informed. 

The Doctor Eliot who first swam into 
my undergraduate ken as the martinet who 
stalked across the yard, and who was tra- 
ditionally regarded as an important, hos- 
tile, and sinister influence, — a sort of Dick- 
ens-like haunted-man, — was a very remark- 
able person. His voice was remarkable, — ■ 
a low vibrant, controlled, melodious, voice 
that seemed to have so much reverence in 
it, the voice, you would say, of a cultivated 
man. And yet President Eliot had not the 
point of view of a cultivated man, nor had 
he reverence for cultivation per se. He re- 
garded cultivation somewhat as Michael 
Angelo regarded the painting of the Vene- 
171 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

tian school, — as a thing fit for women. 
Life was greater than culture. No ideals 
except ideals of conduct had reality for him. 
Literature and philosophy and all that were 
the names of things in bottles to him. I'm 
not sure that there was not in him a touch 
of jealousy, a Puritan dread of the Hu- 
manities. With this was combined a truly 
unique pity for poverty in any student, and 
a truly pious belief in education as a 
means of self -advancement. And let us 
pause here to note that in all this Eliot 
was a sincere, spontaneous representative 
of the average American. By some acci- 
dent which separated him from his own 
class, — for New England possessed many 
men with the old-fashioned feeling for the 
Humanities, — he became representative of 
the country at large. 

If there was about Doctor Eliot an ab- 
sence of cultivation, there was the presence 
of force. The voice was force; its vibra- 
tions were the vibrations of force. The 
modulations of it were modulations of 
force, the melody was the melody of force. 
Behind it there was a two-handed engine of 
human pertinacity, an intellect very accu- 
rately limited and a genius for the under- 
standing of men. 

172 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

I will give an instance of his clairvoyance 
in matters of character. When I was half- 
way through college my family lost money. 
I was on the verge of leaving Harvard. 
News of the situation somehow reached 
Eliot, and he sent for me and offered me 
tutoring. It appeared that a certain young 
loafer (whom I will not name, as he be- 
came through the incident and has remained 
ever since, a valued friend) required the 
services of a mental puncher of some sort 
to force him to work. It must be remem- 
bered that I did not belong to the working 
classes in college ; and never dreamed of tu- 
toring anyone. I really was not competent 
to do proper tutoring. But this kind of a 
boosting job was within my powers. I had 
not known that it was within my powers, 
but Doctor Eliot knew it; and I did such 
wonders with my young renegade, and he 
gained such unheard-of marks in the ensu- 
ing examinations, that both he and I have 
lived on the memory of those intellectual 
triumphs ever since. At the time I speak 
of there must have been a thousand under- 
graduates in the academic department, and 
Doctor Eliot had the reputation of not 
knowing one man from another. This an- 
ecdote is one out of hundreds. In every 
173 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

walk of life, in all his dealings with men, 
Doctor Eliot was doing such things every 
day. His greatness lay in his handling of 
men. 

He had his policies, which, as I conceive, 
were to make Harvard large and well- 
known. Besides this matter he had his 
" Elective System," which I have never un- 
derstood, but which seems to have been a 
corollary from the axiom " size first." It 
was imagined that a university must be a 
place where everything was taught, and 
that all sorts of departments ought to be 
opened at once. It was perfectly natural 
that America, looking at Germany, and bent 
upon swallowing the whole of learning at 
one gulp, should invent some sort of great 
fair, where the students were to come and 
take their fill, following their own election 
under some sort of supervision. The thing 
which nobody seems to have thought of 
was the relation which any foreign Uni- 
versity bears to the average literacy of the 
country it serves. Perhaps our pedagogues 
neglected this consideration with their eyes 
open. They conceived that a University 
need provide opportunities merely, and that 
the students would do the rest. Now in 
Germany, where every student is already a 
174 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

highly educated person, who knows what 
he wants and knows how to work, such a 
system is admirable. But in America, 
where the boys come up to college with bro- 
ken sets of rudimentary reminiscence, and 
without knowing what they want or 
how to get it, the great need in any Uni- 
versity is the need of good teaching. We 
have found this out since those days; and 
we have discovered it largely through the 
strong-handed, logical power with which 
Harvard pursued the other path and took 
the consequences. So, also, in the en- 
deavor to introduce research work, and to 
put a premium on the original thesis, it was 
surely natural to imitate Germany, and to 
forget that not even the immensely high 
average of general education among the 
Germans is sufficient to prevent much of 
their research work from being a stench in 
the nostrils, — an agony under the long-suf- 
fering moon. A special thesis should be 
the work of a ripe scholar, — if possible of 
a man who also knows the world. But 
ought we to set a man to making original re- 
searches in anthropology and Hindu-meta- 
physics when he has had no experience of 
life and only a class-room knowledge of 
books ? 

175 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Eliot's greatness, however, lay not in his 
conceptions, — which were simple enough, 
and sometimes, as many have thought, mis- 
taken; but in his power to carry them 
through. The circumstances required the 
construction of a one-man machine. It 
may be remarked parenthetically that all 
rapid changes in society come about through 
the creation of a one-man machine. This 
is the only way in which executive business 
on a large scale can be done quickly. A 
true University, on the other hand, can 
never rest upon the will of one man. A 
true University always rests upon the wills 
of many divergent-minded old gentlemen, 
who refuse to be disturbed, but who growl 
in their kennels. Now Eliot was a serv- 
ant of his age, and his age commissioned 
him to refashion Harvard within a life- 
time. 

Administrative talent means the power to 
serve unseen masters, to know by instinct 
what can be done and to do it, to weigh op- 
ponents, thwarting some, conciliating oth- 
ers; deceiving some, destroying others. 
And all the while in the background of the 
great administrator's mind lie the great 
forces which he is really serving, — the po- 
litical forces, the millions of clients, the 
176 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

practical world of his day. A thinker may 
reach mankind through his books: he may 
live in ideas which are realized only in a 
later generation or are never realized at all. 
He is bound to his age by no ties except met- 
aphysical ties. But an administrator, how- 
ever able, can accomplish only that which 
the work-a-day world of his day will per- 
mit him to accomplish. If he tries to do 
more he will be turned out of office. In 
the case of Doctor Eliot the subjection of 
the administrator to his age was especially 
apparent; for Eliot's first great need was a 
leed of money ; and money could only come 
from State Street and from Wall Street, 
and could only be expended in ways which 
the business men of America approved. 
The money question is the key to Doctor 
Eliot's career, merely because it is the key 
to his epoch. His very extraordinary na- 
ture could, I believe, have ruled a seven- 
teenth-century theocracy. He cared noth- 
ing for money; he cared merely for power. 
But power in the United States between 
1 870-1910 meant money power: therefore 
Eliot's nature took on a financial hue. 

I remember being surprised and a little 
shocked at the first speech I ever heard from 
him. It was, I think, at a great Harvard 
177 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

function in Memorial Hall, perhaps in con- 
nection with the 250th Anniversary of the 
College. Eliot seemed to dwell upon noth- 
ing but money. Figures were in every cli- 
max ; not figures of speech, but Arabic, dec- 
imal symbols of value. And his words 
were music to the audience ; every statement 
was greeted with applause. I came to re- 
flect afterwards that it was only by such 
music as this that the wine could be drawn 
from the cask. Eliot in his financial rhapso- 
dies drew golden tears down Pluto's cheek, 
and he built his College. The music was 
crude: it was not Apollo's lute: it was the 
hurdy-gurdy of pig-iron and the stock yards. 
To this music rose the walls of Har- 
vard, and of all our Colleges, — our solemn 
temples, theaters, clinics, dormitories, mu- 
seums. So also of the somewhat Coryban- 
tic advertising that Eliot inaugurated and 
which still continues in milder form, the 
clubs, parades, intelligence offices and boat 
rides, the Harvard Brigade that beats up 
trade for the College, — foolish would be 
the man who should blame any individual 
for these things (as I have often done). 
They are the symbols of contemporary 
America, — inevitable, necessary, the por- 
178 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

tals of the future. As for Eliot's share in 
all of them, all one can say is, " What won- 
derful manipulation of an era, what mas- 
terly politics!" If you find in Pindar's 
odes the intimate longings of the Greek na- 
ture, you will find in Eliot's reports the 
throb of the American heart; you will find 
in his propaganda the genius of the Amer- 
ican people of his epoch. These are the 
reasons why Eliot became one of the great 
figureheads of the age. 

One can never really explain a man, or 
track talent to its lair; and all attempts to 
do so are works of the imagination. No 
one can follow the currents of influence 
that run between a man and his antagonists, 
or between a man and his followers. All 
that we ever really do in such cases is to 
state the problem. I have always been sur- 
prised at the influence exercised by Eliot 
over his contemporaries, some of whom 
seemed to be his equals in moral force and 
his superiors in power of thinking. They 
regarded him as divinely commissioned, 
and they stood aside. They withheld their 
judgment in a manner which I thought al- 
most immoral; but I see now that this was 
merely a phenomenon of the. epoch. 
179 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

These men adored Eliot ;. to them he was 
great and good and magnanimous, — a be- 
ing superior to themselves. 

Such an ascendency was not gained in 
a moment, but grew up during many years, 
and resulted from many different qualities 
in Doctor Eliot. It was accomplished by the 
glamour of his personality, by the general 
belief in his righteousness, and in his humil- 
ity, by his appeal to ethnic loyalty (Har- 
vard and New England), and most of all, it 
was accomplished through the fact that 
Eliot was a man of destiny and these other 
men were inquirers. There were, of 
course, quarrels in the camp of Harvard; 
there was opposition; there was hostility as 
deep as life on the part of many strong per- 
sonalities. But there never was a death- 
grapple (I mean defiance, resignations, 
pamphlets), between Eliot and a man of the 
first rank. Those whom he could not con- 
trol, he side-shunted in some way that left 
them harmless. The men of the first rank 
he hypnotized. To be sure, they didn't quite 
know, as we do to-day, what was happen- 
ing, and what conditions would be left be- 
hind; but they would have let him do any- 
thing. I have listened to some of these 
men in open-mouthed wonder when they 
180 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

expounded their views on President Eliot. 
The aged Emerson was one of Eliot's ad- 
mirers. They put Emerson on the Board 
of Trustees of Harvard and he used to wan- 
der about Cambridge casting his innocent 
benediction upon the work of reorganiza- 
tion. " But why, but why," asks the cas- 
ual observer, " do I detect a note of dis- 
approval in this description of what was 
happening at Harvard ? " In order to an- 
swer this question one must recur to gen- 
eral ideas. A college is the home of scho- 
lastic influence, and scholasticism means 
leisure. Leisure is a plant of slow growth, 
hard to domesticate in any hurried, new 
and commercial society. Cultivated men 
are men of whims and tastes, of enthusi- 
asms and of special talents. Cultivation 
cannot be dragooned. It must be humored. 
The little sprouts and spears of true uni- 
versity life that had slowly and painfully 
taken root about Harvard Square during 
two hundred years, were destroyed at the 
behest of our great ignorant National 
Board of Improvements. It was heart- 
rending, but inevitable. If Eliot had not 
done it, the age would have found a man 
that would. The way this system works in 
crushing talent is somewhat as follows: — 
181 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Let us suppose that there is, in a certain 
University, a young instructor of promise 
in the field of English literature. Shall he 
be advanced? Of course he shall. But 
it appears that he has opinions with regard 
to the new gymnasium that are opposed to 
the views of the Control. He can write 
and speak: he is a forcible person. How 
then can we advance him? His advance- 
ment would put our whole administration 
in jeopardy. On the contrary, let him un- 
derstand that in this college there is no fu- 
ture for him; then he will quickly depart 
and leave us to carry on our important 
projects. Can we leave an ivy-mantled 
tower in the midst of our New Boulevard? 
This is the way that progress looks upon 
cultivation. It is a strange thing how 
vice always strikes at the heart. Not only 
vice, but mere error works a blight: some 
policy which seems harmless, or seems to 
be mistaken in only one of its aspects, turns 
out to involve death-doing consequences. 
Sometimes a lack of tact — or what seems 
a mere lack of tact — comes between a 
character and its destiny; or a man dies 
from a cold in the head. So this harmless- 
seeming error in the choice of young pro- 
182 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

fessors did, in fact, generate a poison which 
deadened the whole of education. 

What is the most important thing in edu- 
cation? It is the relation between teacher 
and pupil. Here is the focus of the whole 
matter ; this tiny crucible must boil, or your 
whole College will be cold. The Business 
Era chilled this heart-center of University 
life in America; because, during this Era, 
natural law operated to bring the youngest 
scholars under the control of unenthusiastic 
instructors. Persons of individual power 
were the very ones who were discharged. 
Thus the instructors, — -without anyone's 
being aware of it, — were being picked out 
because of their unenthusiasm. So terrible 
is natural law. 

There is, however, a truer and more aw- 
ful aspect of the matter. The system 
stamped out private mind in our colleges. 
It attacked the soul of the individual in- 
structor through its control over his liveli- 
hood. This is the great historic crime of 
the world, the crime of churches, empires, 
tyrannies; and it has been the great crime 
of our commercial epoch in America. It 
has been a successful crime and it has im- 
poverished the intellect and chilled the char- 
183 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

acter of our teaching classes for a genera- 
tion. 

Let us return to Doctor Eliot. Every 
generation is a secret society, and has incom- 
municable enthusiasms, tastes and interests 
which are a mystery both to its predecessors 
and to posterity. There is a Zeitgheist at 
the bottom of all hero-worship. Heroes 
are created by the puffing up of faith out of 
the soil, — a spontaneous exhalation from 
contemporary, spiritual conditions. The 
essence of hero-worship seems to be this : — 
the worshiper is convinced that what the 
hero is about to do is for the best: the wor- 
shiper backs and indorses his champion by 
instinct and before the act. A slight paral- 
ysis of the judgment in the worshiper is 
what creates the situation. How this par- 
alysis arises it is impossible to say ; but any- 
one who has ever felt the joy of even a 
momentary paralysis of the judgment, — 
of even a momentary belief in any hero, — 
can understand the rise of all heroes. The 
pleasure that lives in the spontaneous act 
of worship brings the hero into existence. 
Those men who evoke such worship must 
be allowed their special rank. This does 
not mean, however, that these men will 
permanently interest the world. The only 
184 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

thing it certainly proves in them is an in- 
ordinate and tremendous vitality. 

Everything about Eliot was vital. His 
wonderful low voice, his benignant smile, 
a smile that was assured, well-poised and 
habitual, could not be forgotten. To talk 
with him was to be played upon by a foun- 
tain of genial force. It was not quite nat- 
ural force. Perhaps you felt just a touch 
of control, as if you were toeing drawn in 
somewhere. Perhaps you questioned 
" Why this benevolence ? " or feared he 
might be crediting you with almost too 
much assent to his own view of the world; 
— as a very motherly nurse might smile on 
a new-born babe with rather more approval 
than the child thought was called for by the 
circumstances. Yet the principal experi- 
ence was one of pleasure. As for the gen- 
eral impression you had in your mind, when 
you thought of Eliot's position in the world 
of Boston; — a little nimbus of glory al- 
ways seemed to enclose him. He was the 
victim of a general apotheosis. He was 
really a king of men in his generation. 

It was interesting to see a man so dis- 
tinctly of the. past as Eliot was, both in ex- 
ternals and in internals, take the lead in the 
nineteenth century. He had the formality 
185 






MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

of manner which belonged to 1820, — the 
formality of the man who never was young, 
but must have been a precisian in his earli- 
est days. He had the temperament of the 
ecclesiastic, of the Archbishop, the mission- 
ary, the General of an Order. What is it 
that such men accomplish? They unify, 
they spread a standard. They are great 
yeomen, who brand wild cattle and build 
fences. The savage, terrible hordes of 
America waked up in 1870, to the impor- 
tance of salvation by education. Perhaps 
they valued education too highly, and in 
their ignorance demanded more than even 
education can give. Yet these hordes were 
ingenuous in their desire to be saved. As 
the Frankish tribes in the sixth century sub- 
mitted to Rome, so the Americans in the 
nineteenth submitted to Massachusetts. 
The creatures were received and taxed, 
schooled and attended to. Some lowering 
of old standards, some loss of cultivation 
(let us hope only temporary), ensued as a 
matter of course. Yet the whole process 
was important, significant, big with influ- 
ence upon the future. The Pope during 
this epoch was Charles William Eliot. 

It is hard to get far enough away from 
the canvas to take any general view of such 
186 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

a subject as education. Education means 
everything. 

I remember the expectations with which 
I entered College, the vistas of Classical 
reading, of historical discussion, of scien- 
tific thought that rose in my mind when I 
thought of Harvard. I supposed that all of 
this delightful exploration into the uni- 
verse would go forward accompanied by 
the genial assistance of elder people and by 
the joyous emulation of younger ones. 
Not school hours and recitations, but after- 
noon walks, suppers and excursions, con- 
versation and experimental essay, the crit- 
ique, the daring paraphrase, lived in my 
mind as the probable stage-settings and ve- 
hicles of academic education. I suppose I 
had read about such things in books and 
memoirs. After the first cold douche and 
shock of arrival in Harvard College was 
past, however, I became as hardened as the 
rest. By the time I came to know Louis 
Dyer he seemed to me to be a quixotic per- 
son. Just as your nicely-brought-up little 
boy comes back out of the street and utters 
vulgar bombast in the drawing room, so did 
I adopt the tone of Harvard College and 
patronize (I remember the feeling), yes, 
patronize this excellent gentleman, Louis 
187 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Dyer, who was trying to recall me to my 
own tastes and beliefs. 

The ladies'-tea era and the young men's 
Christian era, which I have mentioned, did 
not come into blossom while I was an under- 
graduate, but a few years later, and as a 
reaction from the awful bleakness that was 
just setting in in my day. No one can deny 
the wholesomeness of this drawing-room 
movement, yet no one can doubt its inade- 
quacy. Young college men can get a great 
deal from drawing rooms and from tea, 
and from bishops ; but their real social needs 
are best supplied by hard-thinking, highly- 
educated men, not too much older than 
themselves, who live and work and think 
with them. Such men impart their ideals, 
their knowledge, their benevolence, to the 
students in the very act and process of col- 
lege life and work. The sudden discovery 
by certain philanthropists that the social side 
of education was all but extinct at Harvard, 
led to the formation of brigades and broth- 
erhoods whose members went out and 
brought in the half-frozen students, much 
as the Salvation Army sends out persons 
with stretchers to bring in the victims of 
alcoholism. 

The times called for such emergency 
188 



PRESIDENT ELIOT 

work, and perhaps some deep instinct told 
the educators that if they should direct their 
steps straight toward Humanity, they would 
find the humanities. 

In recent years it has been discovered on 
all hands that what our colleges need is 
" inspired teachers." Harvard gave a 
prize to an essay on this subject not long 
ago. But how to find such teachers is the 
question. They cannot be ordered by the 
gross from the factory. They must be dis- 
covered, one by one, and brought home 
from the woods and swamps, like orchids. 
They must be placed in a conservatory, not 
in a carpenter-shop; and they must be hon- 
ored and trusted. They must be allowed 
to teach their own subjects in their own 
ways, and to hold and express private opin- 
ions about University management. Such 
men can never be introduced into our col- 
leges except through a widespread " inspi- 
ration " on the part of everyone in the coun- 
try as to what education means. I think 
I see a College president of the old style, 
after he has obtained a finely recommended, 
young, " inspiring " teacher, and has dis- 
covered that the teacher's " inspiration " 
slops over into practical matters, and affects 
College management. The president would 
189 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

regard himself as false to his trust unless 
he took immediate steps to restrict, curtail 
and qualify that young man's inspirations. 
No, no! There will be no volcanic change 
in university conditions in America. The 
elements that control the situation are ele- 
ments which change very slowly. The 
American people must come to value learn- 
ing for its own sake before we can hope 
for scholars as the managers of our educa- 
tion. 

When a Museum of Fine Arts is founded 
in a Western city it is at first managed by 
business men, because there are no experts 
at hand. As time goes on, however, 
trained scholars and competent persons are 
gradually found, to whom the institution is 
entrusted for management. This illustra- 
tion may give us an allegory of the whole 
recent history of American education. 
Business men have run the colleges because 
business was predominant. The time is 
coming when our colleges will be run by 
scholars because the people trust the schol- 
ars. We already see the beginning of this 
epoch in instances which require no cita- 
tion; and we may be content as to the gen- 
eral direction in which the forces are mov- 
ing. 

190 



NOTES ON THE TEACHING 
OF ART 



XIII 

NOTES ON THE TEACHING OF ART 

You must improve the road bed without 
stopping the trains. Every artistic labor 
should have meaning; and scales should 
never be played as mere gymnastic exer- 
cises; there must be music in them. 
The difficulty in all training is that we are 
obliged to take up a part at a time, although 
the essence of every artistic appeal is unity. 
The academic mind dissects the unity into 
elements for purposes of discussion. The 
problem is dissolved and dealt with in 
pieces. It is stated as grammar, counter- 
point, etc. Herein lies an illusion: because 
all this analysis is always powerless to catch 
the essence. Therefore in teaching the 
analysis you must remember that it is a 
husk. You must remember that this critical 
view exists merely for purposes of discus- 
sion. Criticism is powerless to reach art. 
Art itself proceeds in a region quite beyond 
the reach of other expression save itself. 
193 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

The child does not know this. The child 
likes the rule. He longs to make art easy. 
He will go astray and become a brilliant 
pupil and an empty artist, unless his mind 
is encouraged to keep the grammar sub- 
ordinate. 

Your form must be perfect, of course. 
That is nothing. That is merely like " dear 
sir," or " yours truly " — the symbol of a 
species of intercourse. Any stammering or 
equivocation here casts on your meaning a 
doubt which is avoidable. It must be 
brushed away quietly, and without with- 
drawing the attention from the main cur- 
rent of idea — as a pianist finds his place on 
the keyboard without looking at his hands. 

The eternal secret is that life runs, and 
is never caught. Art is a chase. It shows 
the direction; it suggests; it follows; it in- 
dicates. But the secret remains a secret, 
the experience an experience. If it were not 
so the world would be fuller than it is of 
master-pieces, and the mystery of existence 
would be explained. 

The question, then, at any moment with 
any pupil is, How much can he carry to- 
day? Is he a great river of force and filled 
with ideas of his own — an advanced stu- 
dent, ambitious, classical-minded? Then 
194 



THE TEACHING OF ART 

let him wreak his power on the most refined 
problems of technique — questions that 
vexed Phidias. These things are what he 
comes prepared for. He is their scholar. 
But you will find that good artists, both 
great and small, are good because, from 
their earliest years, they have not taken in 
more than they could digest. They are in 
the saddle and have always been in the 
saddle. There has been an artistic impetus 
in their lives which subordinated their 
knowledge to their spirit. 

Now in teaching a child, the unity of his 
own mind must never be broken. He must 
find his harmony and his grammar by de- 
grees — discover and accept and utilize them 
in the course and process of his own ex- 
periments. He must never be made to 
think that these rules of the art are external 
realities which must be dominated; because 
this is not so. They are internal realities 
which must be approached as part of his 
own nature. 

Though Aquinas and Beethoven should 
combine to tell me the contrary, I say that 
if you take a child's mind thoroughly apart, 
he will be apt never to get it together again. 
The professors and analysts and teachers of 
painting are cases in point. These are men 
195 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

who have believed in the dislocations of the- 
ory. Their attention has been unshipped. 
They have stopped to state the rule, and 
their machinery will not go on again. The 
rules of art, which are, properly speaking, 
merely mnemonic aids to indicate the where- 
abouts of certain invisible and unimagi- 
nable forces, have been treated by these men 
as categorical realities. Thus a teacher 
dies easily, and easily kills others. There 
are those he cannot kill. But there are 
many he can. The unity of a child's mind 
is, to some extent, attacked by all teachers 
except the greatest. The rules, after all, 
are not gods, but servants; and they must 
be kept below stairs in their true position 
as servants. This makes them easy — easy 
to remember, easy to apply. 

In many recent Latin grammars, de- 
signed for the smallest children, the custom 
has come in of giving the usage first, and 
following it up on the next day with the 
statement of the rule. The child learns 
phrases one day, grammar the next. This 
is right. This method keeps the child in- 
formed that the rule is not the truth, but 
merely an easy way of recalling the truth. 
No one can speak by rule. We speak by 
impulse. We must not have — we must 
196 



THE TEACHING OF ART 

never have had — a set of rules standing 
between our impulse and our expression. 

Let us now remember that composition 
is a habit — creation is a habit. In the act 
and process of it, so many extraordinary 
powers come into play that it can never be 
done properly except unconsciously, and 
through the vital force. The flow of life 
must never be stopped. When a man or a 
child is working, there is a unity revolving 
in the back of his head which contains the 
solution and will provide a result consistent 
with every law of art and full of new fire 
besides — if you will but respect it, and 
take its hints. He must be led to see the 
classic analysis come and go behind his own 
phenomena — merge and swim in his own 
vision. This will make him dissatisfied 
with his own work unless that work has the 
classic quality, unless every atomic force is 
accounted for in the outcome, and every 
column adds up ioo. But such a result 
must be arrived at by a natural process, or 
it will never be quite beautiful or quite true. 

The transference of a mood into a work 
of art always involves an element of 
miracle. It contains something new — a 
surprise. The artist has had supernatural 
aid ; something has been done for him. 
197 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

There has been one moment of the uncon- 
scious; and then plain sailing. The mood 
was a unity, and the product is a unity. 
Between the two the thunderbolt fell. This 
is true even of slight works of art — even of 
epigrams. There is a miracle — an incom- 
prehensible communication of force. This 
is due to the fact that the unity has not been 
broken. Musicians like Von Bulow, who 
have taken music all apart and then put it 
together again, never play quite right. The 
thing should never have lain in pieces in 
their mind. 

If, then, you have a child to teach who 
is easily discouraged, do not extinguish him. 
It may be true that the great artists could 
not be extinguished. But the chances are 
that your child is not a great artist. This 
much, then, remains true in the belief — so 
wide spread and so pernicious — that art 
is all genius and that training takes away 
originality. I am here speculating as to 
the nature of those men's minds who do, 
in fact, become artists. And it seems to 
me that such people have had from youth 
upward a core of their own. A child must 
have enough to build on. He must play 
about and start a method of his own, a 
germ' point, a point of departure — some- 
198 



THE TEACHING OF ART 

thing, anything that grows. It may be in 
melody, it may be in portraits, or verses in 
the style of Addison; unless he has a nest- 
egg of this kind he will never be an artist. 
This plasm is part of the immortal web of 
the universe. All you can do is to steer 
nutriment towards it. 

There are as many kinds of good teach- 
ing as there are personal equations between 
a master and a pupil. By mere silence a 
teacher of genius may affect the whole fu- 
ture of a child's mind. I do not believe 
that it is necessary for the formal to swamp 
the vital even for half an hour. The mat- 
ter comes up very acutely in violin teaching, 
and I have often watched with concern the 
sort of attention which teachers fix upon 
arms and legs. These attitudes must be as- 
sumed of course, but it should be so man- 
aged as not to break the thread between the 
child's mind and the sky. 

By a slight change of vocabulary, we 

may regard art as all technique. Certainly 

all of these matters consist of doing or of 

arranging some mechanical thing which 

gives a certain effect ; of screwing up a peg, 

darkening a shadow, lengthening a pause. 

But if you insist upon regarding art from 

this point of view, nevertheless you have 
199 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

to confess ignorance as to what it is that 
produces the thing we want. All of the 
rules and regulations may be obeyed and yet 
in the outcome we are not satisfied. The 
rules give us a barmecide feast, because that 
technique which does the magic is un-get- 
at-able. We thus find ourselves farther 
away from an understanding of the matter 
than if we had accepted its mystery at the 
beginning. 

It is, perhaps, from some such point of 
view as the foregoing that we ought to ap- 
proach the great subject; although it would 
be absurd to stop here and neglect other 
aspects of the case. Most men have noth- 
ing to say. They will under no circum- 
stances become artists. They may hope to 
be craftsmen ; they may gain a little insight 
into the subject which shall tinge their gen- 
eral education. Or they may become 
teachers or writers. A school of art be- 
sides developing creative artists, enlightens 
the community in many other ways. It is 
a focus of pure intellect, and qualifies so- 
ciety. It sends out journeymen, critics, ex- 
perts, evangelists, heralds of freedom, men 
of courage, men of knowledge, standard 
bearers of civilization. It is a school of 
character and of philosophy; of language 



THE TEACHING OF ART 

and articulation; of religion and progress. 
The great artist implies and requires this 
whole hierarchy, which exists beneath him, 
of equally sincere but less gifted persons. 

Let no one undervalue the aesthetic im- 
pulse, or disparage the crude beginnings of 
art. Any finger-post of art shines with 
ethereal fire though it be " flute-playing 
taught here," on a signboard in Omaha. 
How much is any mind liberalized by even 
a short apprenticeship to any branch of art ! 
An academy of design does as much for the 
cause of clear thinking as a college of phil- 
osophy. Nothing so stimulates the mind 
as creative endeavor; and the methods of 
study in science should be modeled after 
those of a good art-school. Here we have 
the cue to any pupil's approach towards any 
study, namely : it should be through succes- 
sive original investigations tempered by 
text books. The psychological problem is 
the same in the study of science as of art 
— to keep the old formulations fluid, to 
possess them and use them, without being 
possessed or ruled by them. In the realm 
of science and of art nothing is fact, all is 
hypothesis, all is symbol. 

Teaching is a personal matter and must 
ever remain so. Schools are only valuable 
201 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

because they house persons. It is consola- 
tory to remember how easily art springs up 
when the conditions are right, and how a 
school of landscape painting may sometimes 
proceed out of a small town which had no 
apparent or peculiar advantages in the mat- 
ter. This is because some man has begun 
to think and to experiment, to make 
sketches, to live in his work and carry for- 
ward speculations of his own. His pupils 
take up the argument, and, for a time, life 
is blown into it; we know not how, there is 
the breath of art in it. 

I do not mean to disparage academies. 
All the buildings and endowments, all the 
circulars, prospectuses, must go forward. 
But let us also be prepared to find that here 
and there a talent is maturing in solitude, 
or an artist is working out his destiny, who 
has only a shred of education to connect 
him with the artistic traditions of the great 
world. 

Since we are walking with a divining 
rod, seeking art, wondering what it is, how 
it arises, how to identify it, holding up a 
finger to the wind, standing breathless in 
the heart of the forest to catch the note of 
the hidden thrush — I will say what comes 
to me — and that most vaguely on the gen- 

202 



THE TEACHING OF ART 

eral subject; for the arts and crafts all 
differ from one another — and differ espe- 
cially in technicality. The art of making 
a violin must be learned in a shop; but the 
art of poetry may be picked up by practice 
and on the sly. Architecture is organized ; 
literature is greatly disorganized. The 
arts, moreover, play into each other's hands 
in strange ways, and the excitement they 
convey takes new forms upon new soils. 
The introduction, for instance, of foreign 
music has an immediate influence on the 
temperament and philosophy of any people, 
and is very likely to become visible in belles- 
lettres and fiction. Walter Scott left many 
traces upon the painting of Continental 
Europe; Piranesi, upon the domestic furni- 
ture of the entire Western world. The 
subject lies in a region beyond the reach of 
accurate study. The reality and the im- 
portance of it is apt to be brought home to 
us through meeting some talented child to 
whom the language of one of these arts is 
native and necessary. We begin to look 
with his eyes, to hear with his ears, and, be- 
hold, we gain an introduction to new 
worlds. Here now lies a practical matter; 
for the future of art depends upon the edu- 
cation of infants. 

203 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

There is one plain rule for the discovery 
of artistic talent : the child is found at work, 
scribbling or strumming or drawing. He is 
inseparable from practice. He is already 
in the traces, he needs only guidance. You 
may supply materials ; interest you need not 
supply, he is already under the spell. There 
are threads of golden woof and web that 
gleam, appearing and disappearing in the 
air — seolian harps placed in the windows 
of life. These are the visions of human- 
ity, the visions of former artists. The 
whole world is full of them. They hang 
from the rafters like magic spider-webs to 
catch the imagination of youth. Here is 
glittering apparel which the child feels to be 
his own, and would put on immediately. 

Now what is the relation between the long 
years of drudgery that must, as a rule, be 
gone through, and the ultimate heaven of 
creative work? This question cannot be 
answered simply. Great diligence in tech- 
nical matters has some relation to remote 
spiritual interests; and a passion for exacti- 
tude in the drawing of an apple will issue 
in some sort of force in the painting of a 
crucifixion. Literature seems to be even 
more mysterious than the other arts; and 
the relation between careful writing and the 
204 



THE TEACHING OF ART 

development of power is here very obscure 
and yet very certain. It always seems as if 
the talented child were already in charge of 
a spirit which we could not see, who whis- 
pered to him that this digging must be done 
for the treasure. It seems to be unques- 
tionable that those remotest and most happy 
touches of genius which one would say, no 
study could come at, no experience suggest, 
are the very ones which are due to a knowl- 
edge of the craft, to long experience and 
private endeavor. 

The handling of difficulties seems to be 
the road to facilities. Something crudely 
and honestly analyzed cracks the shell of 
the mystery; and an impersonal artistic 
treatment becomes the vehicle of the most 
personal kind of expression. Thus the 
limitations — namely, those very conditions 
which constitute technique — give rise 
through compression to the soul of the 
work. 

The artist's education, which comes from 
constant work, involves, somehow, the re- 
cording of ever-increasing depths of per- 
sonal vision and of private history. At last 
nature brings her gifts on a silver salver 
to the perfect artist and puts her words in 
his mouth. He thinks he is merely pursu- 
205 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

ing the solution of a problem, and, in effect, 
he is unrolling the hidden tapestries of his 
own soul. What portions of his work 
ought one to consider as technical? What 
portions as non-technical? I do not know; 
nor can anyone imagine. 

Teaching consists in helping the pupil's 
mind towards an understanding of itself. 
A moderately endowed mathematician may 
teach a child of mathematical genius, and 
teach him well. So may a teacher of gram- 
mar, or of music, or of architecture teach 
things far beyond his own powers of ac- 
complishment. He suggests and inspires. 
This is a very consolatory reflection ; and it 
is indeed true that the academic person may 
carry the fire of Prometheus in a rod of 
fennel. The people who do this have the 
quality of genius about them: they are 
teachers of genius. They cannot create, 
and yet then can transmit, they can illu- 
mine. In their own peculiar way they are 
artists too — or at any rate, prophets of art. 



206 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 



XIV 

MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

Maria Weston Chapman deserves a 
medallion in the historic hall of her genera- 
tion. Indeed she looked and bore herself 
like bronze and marble, and made upon all 
observers the impression of heroic woman- 
hood. There are women who have a 
maturity in their walk even in their teens, 
and who carry a girlish bearing into old 
age. There is a unity and a focus in their 
being which makes them distinguished. In 
all they do or say there is some natural 
force which is inevitable and spontaneous. 
All this is largely a matter of physical en- 
dowment, and goes with abundant health. 
In my grandmother's case it went with a 
kind of victorious beauty which became ac- 
centuated as the " cordage of the counte- 
nance " declared itself in her latest years. 

As a small child I was immensely im- 
pressed with her. I had never seen anyone 
209 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

like her. She looked like a cameo, and yet 
had a buoyant — I had almost said bound- 
ing — quality which cameos do not suggest. 
Many persons in her generation were im- 
posing, but she was the first of them that 
I ever saw, and this gave me a new idea of 
how people of the great world might or 
ought to appear. She had a talent for con- 
duct, she had a genius for appearance. 
She was exactly fitted to lead a cause; and 
the cause of Abolition, which broke into 
flame during her girlhood, was a most per- 
fect and typical example of what a cause 
can be. It was a religious awakening. It 
began with great and sudden fervor in the 
breasts of a few people, and worked in such 
a manner as to separate these people from 
the rest of the community. To awaken the 
rest of America became their one idea. 
Converts came to them, as is usual in such 
cases, chiefly from the humbler classes ; and 
the emotional fervor of the movement 
burned with a steady heat for thirty years, 
till in one way or another every individual 
in the nation was reached by it. The 
Abolitionists are sometimes blamed for 
causing the war; but the real cause of the 
war was human nature. The war was the 
final working out of a great change. Aboli- 

210 



, 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

tion was merely the symptom that a change 
had begun. 

Mrs. Chapman was an early convert, and 
was well fitted to take the lead in such a 
movement, or, more accurately speaking, to 
stage and conduct the cause; for Garrison 
was her leader, and she was in every sense 
a standard-bearer and a lieutenant, — never, 
properly speaking, the leader. She was al- 
ways handsomely dressed, smiling, domi- 
nant, ready to meet all comers. She en- 
tered a room like a public person. She was 
a doughty swordswoman in conversation, 
and wore armor. There was something 
about her that reminded me of a gladiator, 
and I sometimes wondered how she had 
ever borne children at all and whether she 
had nursed them, or had just marched off 
to the wars in Gaul and Iberia, while the ur- 
chins were being cared for by a f reed-woman 
in the Campania. She was fond of chil- 
dren nevertheless, and used to invite her 
grandchildren to come to her room, where 
she would inaugurate the most ceremoni- 
ous and important sessions of book-cover- 
ing, and the making of scrap-books, cuttings, 
and pastings. The gum-arabic must be 
bought and melted down on the previous 
day, the figured papers and prints were pro- 

211 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

duced from European sources, and the 
whole manufacture was conducted with 
pomp and mystery. She used to read 
Shakespeare to us when the youngest was 
about three, and she would arrange the 
drawing-room to represent the stage. She 
had Caesar on his bier covered with dra- 
pery, and a bit of hidden marble to repre- 
sent his Roman nose. When she read 
aloud she was so particular about the state 
of her voice, her enunciation, and her de- 
livery that she would eat no dinner before a 
performance, but take only the juice of a 
lemon — as if she were to sing in grand 
opera. 

I think that her temperament and phy- 
sique must in early life have marked her as 
a figure-head, and that the many years she 
afterwards spent in Europe as the represen- 
tative of a cause gave her, perhaps, the 
habit of the part. She was, in fact, an em- 
bodiment; and this is the reason why her 
presence conveyed more than her spoken or 
written words, and why people were so as- 
tonished at her, and have left so many de- 
scriptions of her. At the basis of her ef- 
fectiveness was a perfectly phenomenal 
fund of physical health. She was beam- 
ing and ruddy down to her last days — for 

212 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

she was nearly eighty when she died, and 
had spent many years toward the end of her 
life in nursing a paralyzed brother. 

One great and rare merit she shared with 
Garrison. When their cause triumphed 
they retired, and both of them deserve in 
this to be canonized for their good taste, — 
a virtue not always found in Abolitionists. 
She retired, then, and lived in Weymouth, 
Massachusetts, for twenty years or more, 
with a mother and several sisters, all of 
them highly educated, bookish people, and 
two of them, Anne and Dora Weston, 
staunch anti-slavery veterans. The house 
was full of souvenirs of Europe, and of 
presentation copies of the works of mid- 
century European writers. To be an exile 
for opinion's sake is the best introduction 
to the liberals of all foreign countries; and 
Paris, during the Second Empire, contained 
many distinguished Frenchmen who felt 
that they too were in exile. The French in- 
tellectuals were hospitable to the leaders of 
American anti-slavery, who, so far as social 
life went, found in France more than they 
had lost at home. 

All the glamour and excitement of life 
must have gone out of it for my grand- 
mother with the close of the war; yet she 
213 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

continued to live as freshly and to talk as 
gladly as if some persecution were still in 
progress, and she were Joan of Arc on the 
way to the pyre. 

Certain .failings she had, — perhaps I 
ought rather to call them never-failings. 
The sword would leap from the scabbard 
at any allusion to past controversy in which 
she or Mr. Garrison had been concerned, 
or in which anyone in the world had held 
opinions condemned by the Garrisonians. 
The sword of Gideon flashed with unabated 
grace. The indignation was as fresh as 
manna in Arabia — renewed with every 
matin. She really believed that the mem- 
ory of the wicked should rot, and that the 
wicked were — almost everyone in the past, 
and a good many among the survivors. If 
Channing had been wrong in 1828, she 
would excoriate him in 1882. If Sumner 
had hesitated at some moment to see the 
white light of truth, then his bones must be 
dragged from their resting place and his 
habitation become a dunghill. Among the 
true, inner-seal Garrisonians the wrong 
kind of anti-slavery was always considered 
as anti-Christ; and the feats of memory 
which the Old Guard of Abolition exhib- 
ited with regard to the ins and outs of an- 
214 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

cient controversy went far to explain the 
survival of Homer's poems throughout the 
long centuries before writing was invented. 
So, as by fire, are certain things burned into 
men's souls. 

I must here sorrowfully record a distinc- 
tion between my grandmother and Garrison 
himself. Garrison was never rancorous, at 
least he was never really rancorous. His 
rancor was political and done for effect. 
He assumed a tone of malevolence for rhe- 
torical reasons. Now, my grandmother 
became, by a kind of necessity, more re- 
ligious than the Pope himself. She was a 
partisan: she had not the liberty which the 
leader enjoys of changing her mind, or of 
being inconsistently good-humored when 
she felt like it. She was a halberdier and 
body-guard. She never seemed to disa- 
gree with Mr. Garrison or to turn a crit- 
ical eye on him. I believe it would have 
done them both good if she had lifted 
her battle-ax against the hero now and 
then. 

For twenty-five years she was manager 
of the Annual Anti-slavery Bazaar which 
raised the funds for the cause. Europe 
was laid under contribution for interesting 
and odd things, which should draw Pro- 
2iS 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Slavery Boston to the booths. The prepa- 
ration for the great Fair went on pretty 
steadily during the rest of the year, and 
this branch of anti-slavery propaganda was 
useful in keeping the liberals in Europe in 
touch with our struggle. Mrs. Chapman 
edited a little annual volume or keepsake, 
called " The Liberty Bell," which contained 
many articles by herself. As the executive 
of an unpopular cause her business was to 
be always in good spirits, always in the 
right, always insuperably competent. It 
is clear that her activity belongs to a 
very noble species of political activity rather 
than to the field of philosophy. The 
religion of labor makes character, but is 
injurious to mind. And I cannot help 
thinking of all the anti-slavery people as 
being earth-born, titanic creatures, whom 
Nature spawned to stay a plague — and 
then withdrew them, and broke the mold. 
Heroic they remain. 

It will be remembered that our struggle 
over slavery showed up the organized 
churches of Christianity in a terrible light. 
What was the use of such churches as ours 
were shown to be ? Where was Christ to be 
found in them? If an Abolitionist were 
by nature a mystic, or an evangelical person 
216 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

(like Garrison or S. J. May), he naturally 
took refuge in the New Testament itself. 
If he were by nature neither mystical nor 
romantic, he was apt to become a stoic ; and 
it was to this class that my grandmother 
belonged. We may see the same tendency 
exhibited on a great scale in the history of 
France. The hold which the classics have 
on the French temperament is due to this, — 
that the French are not sufficiently emo- 
tional to be in sympathy with Hebrew 
thought: it offends them. The morality 
of France is stoical. My grandmother 
was, in her endowments, and in her limita- 
tions, very much such a person as a virtuous 
stoic of the ancient world may have been. 
Her religion was a totality as to conduct, 
but was fragmentary in statement. It was 
made up of proverbs, poems, and anecdotes 
from all ages, — wisdom-scraps of an en- 
couraging and militant nature. When the 
original Garrisonians began their work in 
1832 they supposed that slavery would fall 
before their strokes in a very few years, — 
five or ten perhaps. And so subtly does the 
alchemy of activity sustain hope, that they 
never for a moment lost their conviction 
that victory was imminent, throughout the 
thirty years during which victory kept re- 
217 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

ceding before them like the mirage of water 
in the desert. They only wondered at the 
delay. 

A Cause like this solves all questions 
whether they be matters of metaphysical 
doubt or of practical life. One's business 
is ruined, of course. A child dies; alas, it 
is severe, but let the Cause consume our 
grief. All social ties were snapped long 
ago; it is a trifle. The old standard-bear- 
ers are dropping out from time to time 
through death ; peace be unto them, we have 
others. 

The discipline of such a life — so unu- 
sual, so singular — wore down men and 
women into athletes; the stress made them 
strong. Thus the anti-slavery fighters 
grew hardy through a sort of Roman en- 
durance, which shows in their physiog- 
nomy. It is this force behind the stroke of 
fate that we see in people's faces, — the 
power behind the die that mints them. 

A very notable feature in my grand- 
mother's life was her friendship with Har- 
riet Martineau, whose literary executor she 
afterwards became. The friendship was a 
flawless and enduring union. It began in 
1835, and was a source of unalloyed happi- 
218 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

ness to both women; it ended with Miss 
Martineau's death in 1876. The attach- 
ment was accompanied by independence on 
both sides, but my grandmother used to 
speak of Harriet Martineau with the same 
sort of reverence that Miss Martineau uses 
in speaking of her. 

At one time Miss Martineau thought of 
coming to America to work in the Aboli- 
tion cause. She writes : " The discovery 
of her [Mrs. Chapman's] moral power and 
insight were to me so extraordinary that, 
while I longed to work with and under her, 
I felt that it must be morally perilous to 
lean on any one mind as I could not but 
lean on hers." 

The beginning of their intimacy was not 
without dramatic interest. When Miss 
Martineau arrived in this country on a 
pleasure trip, at the age of thirty-three, she 
was probably the best known, and certainly 
the most powerful woman in England. Her 
writings and her opinions had brought her 
unprecedented popularity both in that coun- 
try and in America. It was therefore of 
great importance to the struggling Aboli- 
tionists to gain her adherence to their cause. 
My grandmother wrote to Miss Martineau 
219 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

while the latter was on her travels in the 
South, but received a rebuff from the au- 
thoress. 

The time soon came, however, when Miss 
Martineau felt forced by her conscience to 
support the unpopular and hated cause of 
Abolition. She was, as she says, unexpect- 
edly and very reluctantly, but necessarily, 
implicated in the struggle. The occasion 
of her declaration of faith was a meeting 
of the Ladies' Anti-slavery Society at the 
house of Francis Jackson on November 18, 
1835. She accepted an invitation to this 
meeting, to the great scandal of her Boston 
hosts. She attended the meeting and, when 
called upon, gave, in a few words, the enor- 
mous prestige of her name to the cause. 
This cut short her social career in America, 
and she became the victim of every kind of 
vilification. She understood this conse- 
quence and did not enjoy it, for it ruined 
her trip and prevented her seeing American 
social life. 

But the greater moral triumph at the back 
of this small unpleasantness was also un- 
derstood both by Miss Martineau and by 
the audience of women in the hushed par- 
lor of Francis Jackson, at the time she ex- 
pressed her anti-slavery conviction in a few 
220 



MARIA WESTON CHAPMAN 

solemn words. It must be noted parenthet- 
ically that everyone who speaks of my 
grandmother always dwells upon the way 
she looked. It is her looks that they can- 
not forget. 

Miss Martineau in her account of the 
meeting at Mr. Jackson's says : " When I 
was putting on my shawl upstairs, Mrs. 
Chapman came to me, bonnet in hand, to 
say, ' You know we are threatened with a 
mob again to-day : but I do not myself much 
apprehend it. It must not surprise us ; but 
my hopes are stronger than my fears.' 

" I hear now, as I write, the clear silvery 
tones of her who was to be the friend of the 
rest of my life. I still see the exquisite 
beauty which took me by surprise that day ; 
the slender, graceful form, the golden hair 
which might have covered her feet ; the bril- 
liant complexion, noble profile, and deep 
blue eyes; the aspect meant by nature to be 
soft and winning only, but that day (as ever 
since), so vivified by courage, and so 
strengthened by upright conviction, as to 
appear the very embodiment of heroism. 
' My hopes/ she said as she threw up her 
golden hair under her bonnet, ' are stronger 
than my fears.' " 

In the same account Miss Martineau de- 
221 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

scribes the extreme tension that existed con- 
cerning her own attitude toward Abolition. 
No one knew just where she stood, or what 
she was going to say. She describes also 
the wave of emotion that swept over the lit- 
tle assemblage upon her unequivocal an- 
nouncement of her hatred of slavery, and 
continues : " As I concluded Mrs. Chap- 
man bowed down her glowing face on her 
folded arms, and there was a murmur of 
satisfaction through the room, while out- 
side, the growing crowd (which did not, 
however, become large) was hooting and 
yelling and throwing mud and dirt against 
the windows." 



COATESVILLE 



XV 

COATESVILLE 1 

We are met to commemorate the anniver- 
sary of one of the most dreadful crimes in 
history — not for the purpose of condemn- 
ing it, but to repent of our share in it. We 
do not start any agitation with regard to 
that particular crime. I understand that an 
attempt to prosecute the chief criminals has 

The explanation of Mr. Chapman's prayer meeting 
in Coatesville, besides what he says in his address 
following, is best given in these words of his own 
taken from a letter: 

" I was greatly moved by the Coatesville lynching 
at the time it occurred, and as the anniversary 
came round my inner idea began to force me to do 
something. I felt as if the whole country would be 
different if any one man did something in penance, 
and so I went to Coatesville and declared my inten- 
tion of holding a prayer meeting to the various busi- 
ness men I could buttonhole. Then there appeared 
an extraordinary thing — the outcome of the lynch- 
ing, i. e., that there is a reign of terror in Coatesville 
at this moment. If you speak of it you are sus- 
pect . . . The daily local newspaper at first refused 

1 Reprinted from Harper's Weekly. 
225 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

been made, and has entirely failed; because 
the whole community, and in a sense our 
whole people, are really involved in the 
guilt. The failure of the prosecution in 
this case, in all such cases, is only a proof 
of the magnitude of the guilt, and of the 
awful fact that everyone shares in it. 

I will tell you why I am here; I will tell 
you what happened to me. When I read 
in the newspapers of August 14, a year ago, 
about the burning alive of a human being, 
and of how a few desperate, fiend-minded 
men had been permitted to torture a man 
chained to an iron bedstead, burning alive, 
thrust back by pitchforks when he strug- 

to mention the lynching in the notice of the prayer 
meeting, but, finally, it was printed on the first page 
for two successive days. Everyone in the city knew 
of it. A friend of mine came over from New York, 
and we did hold the meeting in an unused store — a 
prayer meeting with Bible readings, addresses, 
prayer, silent prayer, and a talk on the whole matter. 
Two persons came : one an anti-slavery old Negress, 
who lives in Boston and was staying in Coatesville; 
the other a man who was, I think, an ' outpost ' find- 
ing out what was up. We held the meeting just as 
if there was a crowd, and I delivered my address. 
There was a church meeting going on opposite to us, 
and people coming* and going and gazing, and our 
glass front windows revealed us like Daniel when 
he was commanded to open the windows and pray." 
226 



COATESVILLE 

gled out of it, while around about stood 
hundreds of well-dressed American citizens, 
both from the vicinity and from afar, com- 
ing on foot and in wagons, assembling on 
telephone call, as if by magic, silent, 
whether from terror or indifference, fasci- 
nated and impotent, hundreds of persons 
watching this awful sight and making no 
attempt to stay the wickedness, and no one 
man among them all who was inspired to 
risk his life in an attempt to stop it, no one 
man to name the name of Christ, of human- 
ity, of government! As I read the news- 
paper accounts of the scene enacted here in 
Coatesville a year ago, I seemed to get a 
glimpse into the unconscious soul of this 
country. I saw a seldom revealed picture 
of the American heart and of the American 
nature. I seemed to be looking into the 
heart of the criminal — ■ a cold thing, an 
awful thing. 

I said to myself, " I shall forget this, we 
shall all forget it; but it will be there. 
What I have seen is not an illusion. It is 
the truth. I have seen death in the heart 
of this people." For to look at the agony 
of a fellow-being and remain aloof means 
death in the heart of the onlooker. Reli- 
gious fanaticism has sometimes lifted men 
227 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

to the frenzy of such cruelty, political pas- 
sion has sometimes done it, personal hatred 
might do it, the excitement of the amphi- 
theater in the degenerate days of Roman 
luxury could do it. But here an audience 
chosen by chance in America has stood 
spellbound through an improvised auto-da- 
fe, irregular, illegal, having no religious 
significance, not sanctioned by custom, hav- 
ing no immediate provocation, the audience 
standing by merely in cold dislike. 

I saw during one moment something be- 
yond all argument in the depth of its signif- 
icance. You might call it the paralysis of 
the nerves about the heart in a people habit- 
ually and unconsciously given over to selfish, 
aims, an ignorant people who knew not 
what spectacle they were providing, or what 
part they were playing in a judgment-play 
which history was exhibiting on that day. 

No theories about the race problem, no 
statistics, legislation, or mere educational 
endeavor, can quite* meet the lack which that 
day revealed in the American people. For 
what we saw was death. The people stood 
like blighted things, like ghosts about Ache- 
ron, waiting for someone or something to 
determine their destiny for them. 

Whatever life itself is, that thing must 
228 



COATESVILLE 

be replenished in us. The opposite of hate 
is love, the opposite of cold is heat; what 
we need is the love of God and reverence 
for human nature. For one moment I 
knew that I had seen our true need; and I 
was afraid that I should forget it and that 
I should go about framing arguments and 
agitations and starting schemes of educa- 
tion, when the need was deeper than educa- 
tion. And I became filled with one idea, 
that I must not forget what I had seen, and 
that I must do something to remember it. 
And I am here to-day chiefly that I may 
remember that vision. It seems fitting to 
come to this town where the crime occurred 
and hold a prayer-meeting, so that our 
hearts may be turned to God through whom 
mercy may flow into us. 

Let me say one thing more about the 
whole matter. The subject we are dealing 
with is not local. The act, to be sure, took 
place at Coatesville and everyone looked to 
Coatesville to follow it up. Some months 
ago I asked a friend who lives not far from 
here something about this case, and about 
the expected prosecutions, and he replied 
to me : " It wasn't in my county," and that 
made me wonder whose county it was in. 
And it seemed to be in my county. I live 
229 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

on the Hudson River; but I knew that this 
great wickedness that happened in Coates- 
ville is not the wickedness of Coatesville 
nor of to-day. It is the wickedness of all 
America and of three hundred years — 
the wickedness of the slave trade. All of 
us are tinctured by it. No special place, no 
special persons, are to blame. A nation 
cannot practice a course of inhuman crime 
for three hundred years and then suddenly 
throw off the effects of it. Less than fifty 
years ago domestic slavery was abolished 
among us ; and in one way and another the 
marks of that vice are in our faces. There 
is no country in Europe where the Coates- 
ville tragedy or anything remotely like it 
could have been enacted, probably no coun- 
try in the world. 

On the day of the calamity, those people 
in the automobiles came by the hundred and 
watched the torture, and passers-by came in 
a great multitude and watched it — and did 
nothing. On the next morning the news- 
papers spread the news and spread the par- 
alysis until the whole country seemed to be 
helplessly watching this awful murder, as 
awful as anything ever done on the earth; 
and the whole of our people seemed to be 
230 



COATESVILLE 

looking on helplessly, not able to respond, 
not knowing what to do next. That spec- 
tacle has been in my mind. 

The trouble has come down to us out of 
the past. The only reason that slavery is 
wrong is that it is cruel and makes men 
cruel and leaves them cruel. Someone may 
say that you and I cannot repent because 
we did not do the act. But we are involved 
in it. We are still looking on. Do you not 
see that this whole event is merely the last 
parable, the most vivid, the most terrible 
illustration that ever was given by man or 
imagined by a Jewish prophet, of the rela- 
tion between good and evil in this world, 
and of the relation of men to one an- 
other ? 

This whole matter has been an historic 
episode; but it is a part, not only of our 
national history, but of the personal history 
of each one of us. With the great disease 
(slavery) came the climax (the war), and 
after the climax gradually began the cure, 
and in the process of cure comes now the 
knowledge of what the evil was. I say 
that our need is new life, and that books 
and resolutions will not save us, but only 
such disposition in our hearts and souls as 
231 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

will enable the new life, love, force, hope, 
virtue, which surround us always, to enter 
into us. 

This is the discovery that each man must 
make for himself — the discovery that what 
he really stands in need of he cannot get 
for himself, but must wait till God gives it 
to him. I have felt the impulse to come 
here to-day to testify to this truth. 

The occasion is not small; the occasion 
looks back on three centuries and embraces 
a hemisphere. Yet the occasion is small 
compared with the truth it leads us to. For 
this truth touches all ages and affects every 
soul in the world. 



232 



JULIA WARD HOWE 



XVI 

JULIA WARD HOWE 

The great Doctor Howe, whose figure tow- 
ers over little Boston, was a man in middle 
life, and was well understood by Europe 
and America to be one of the world's wise 
men, when he married a New York girl of 
remarkable beauty, wit and wealth. This 
was in the year 1843. It made little differ- 
ence to Dr. Howe where he lived, or what 
circle, he moved in ; but when he threw in his 
fortunes with the anti-slavery outcasts and 
Beacon Street looked askance at him, it 
made this difference to his wife, that she 
never really became a Bostonian. She 
lived, however, to become one of the best 
known personalities in the town, and to 
have a little court of her own. There was 
something about her which attracted indi- 
viduals of all conditions, from foreign pa- 
triots, — the residuaries of Dr. Howe's rev- 
olutionary interests, — to the most modern 
representatives of every social reform. 
235 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Her own people had been bankers, with 
harps and marble statues in their salons. 
Singing, and Italian lessons, and the pro- 
vincial splendors of early New York had 
been hers ; and after her marriage with Dr. 
Howe, she had traveled with him abroad 
and had seen many of the celebrities of 
Europe at a time when genius was in bloom 
there. 

Apart from all this, she was in herself a 
daughter of the great liberal epoch of the 
nineteenth century which produced Bright, 
Garrison, Garibaldi and a whole race of 
lesser social missionaries who felt that they 
were marching to music, and who never 
doubted that clouds would break and truth 
triumph in the end, — men and women 
whose idealism and whose belief in the des- 
tinies of mankind bound them into a sort of 
brotherhood in world politics. She had, at 
any rate, lived among the heroes of her 
time, and she retained to the end a bigness 
and heroic outlook upon life which belonged 
to the epoch of her youth. Furthermore 
she was a poetess. In early married life 
she published a volume or two of verse, 
which were read and admired by the world 
of American letters, and the luster of which 
never quite left her. Neither she nor her 
236 




From a photograph by Altman 

MRS. JULIA WARD HOWE 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

circle ever forgot that there were laurels on 
her brow. 

It must be remembered also that she con- 
tinued in her own person the traditions of 
the Transcendentalists, whose school of 
thought became submerged in the welter of 
the anti-slavery struggle. She was a friend 
and disciple of Emerson and felt, as indeed 
every transcendentalist felt, that she had a 
metaphysical creed to expound. If the 
writings of this school have left little that is 
powerful except the Essays of the master 
himself, nevertheless the spirit of the Over- 
soul became expressed in the lives of many 
of his contemporaries. I have known peo- 
ple who wrote philosophy very ill, who yet 
seemed to have received a kind of heavenly 
message from stepping in and out of Emer- 
son's library. This species of Emersonian- 
ism clung to Mrs. Howe. 

Some serene element of the successful 
person, who lives above circumstance, shone 
out of her conversation, — which was, by 
the way, extremely unlike the Concord 
school of talk. She was always a doughty, 
gallant battler in the drawing-room, with 
the old style of attack. She feutered her 
lance, as was the custom of the forties, and 
rode her charger straight at the opponent. 
237 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

The accidents of the world, which had 
swept away wealth and had left her only a 
modest little house, and a scanty income, 
had taken nothing from her. She had al- 
ways lived in mansions of her own. Her 
guests were kings and queens to her. If the 
door had been opened by a charity girl with 
a wooden leg, and, the meal had consisted of 
a chop on a trencher, the guest would still 
have felt that he was being welcomed with 
reverence and was feasting with Hafiz and 
Melchior. There are people in whom spir- 
itual experiences dissolve self -consciousness, 
so that all humanity walks for them on the 
same social plane. Such was the ideal of 
the antique philosophers, and Mrs. Howe, 
in a certain way, reminded one of those an- 
cients. Ben Franklin had the same quality 
in his old age, — a quality which no one 
ought to attain to in youth; for youth is 
properly dedicated to error. When Mrs. 
Howe was young, she was so high-spirited 
and self-willed that she sometimes became 
a problem to her friends. Old ladies have 
told me about her romanticism and her un- 
controllability. I knew her only in old age, 
and when her chief characteristic was an 
unfailing gayety. It was strange that a 
woman of causes, whose main business was 
238 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

to worry politicians, arouse the people and 
do in fact the most unpleasant things a 
woman can do, never should have betrayed 
those traces of the work which are seen in 
almost all public spirited women. 

Mrs. Howe was liberal, spontaneous, 
feminine. Her supreme endowment was 
her health. She had the domed brow and 
the bonhomie of a woman who has never 
been sick. Such people are ever younger 
than their children; for their children soon 
grow up into sad, practical men and women, 
while they themselves retain the buoyancy 
of youth. The world cannot teach them 
sorrow. Mrs. Howe thus became the pet 
of her numerous children, at the same time 
that she was the Mother Superior of the 
latest generation of nonconformist philan- 
thropy in Boston. She accepted both posts 
with enthusiasm. 

Her power of enjoyment was a natural 
advantage, like a large fortune or a great 
talent, and it was really this force that made 
her beloved. If she had a weakness, it was 
the weakness of almost all leaders, the habit 
of accepting adulation from insignificant 
people, whom she suffered to rest in the be- 
lief that she was a prophetess. But she 
did this so innocently, and humbly, that I 
239 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

cannot feel sure that her own hopes and il- 
lusions as to her greatness were not a part 
of her charm. 

The marvel of her was that she should 
never have been influenced by Boston. She 
was not even irritated by the self-sufficiency 
of Bostonians, by that slight mental cramp 
in them which is a grief to many of their 
sincerest admirers. Of course everybody 
in Boston knew her. One couldn't help 
knowing her. The policemen knew her; 
the school-children sang her " Battle Hymn 
of the Republic " ; the statesmen, scholars, 
scientists, and publicists for a generation 
regarded her as one of their cherished in- 
stitutions and as a pillar of the crumbling 
world.; Individual Beacon Street knew 
her, but not collective Beacon Street. To 
collective Beacon Street she was persona 
non grata. I remember being a little 
shocked at the way certain very nice people 
used to speak of her; though in retrospect, 
the prejudice which good society has against 
non-conforming greatness, appears in the 
light of agreeable local color. 

I have often lain awake at night wonder- 
ing what was the matter with Boston. At 
such times, anecdotes creep out of corners 
in my memory and throw doubtful gleams 
240 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

of light on possible solutions. But I can- 
not catch and chain these ideas. One of my 
classmates, a modest youth from South 
Carolina, when he was a Freshman at Har- 
vard, walked into the bosom of a great Bos- 
ton drawing-room with his overshoes on. 
All the family were seated about, — the 
aged and distinguished grandparents, the 
model father, the benignant mother, and 
many appropriate children of all ages. 
My friend was unconscious of his predica- 
ment, young and modest. Summoning all 
of his imperfect Southern breeding, he did 
his best with the hard beginnings of cheer- 
ful talk. But he felt an oppression in the 
air, then a wave of sympathy, — a sense of 
humiliation, — a waiting fear. He saw that 
the younger members of the family were 
in hurried consultation about something, 
which he prophetically knew concerned him- 
self. The suspense became unbearable, 
and at last an appropriate child of the fam- 
ily group drew him aside and whispered to 
him the awful truth. My friend told me 
the story the next day, and I knew instantly, 
and I know now, that the solution of Bos- 
ton lay beneath my hand if I had but the 
wit to see it. But what is it? 

Clarence King told me that he happened 
241 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

to be in Boston in 1870, when Bret Harte 
first appeared upon the extreme Western 
horizon, with his " Luck of Roaring 
Camp," and the rest of his wonderful earli- 
est work in his hand. King at once became 
an object of interest in Boston because he 
knew Bret Harte, and was taken to lunch 
with the famous Saturday Club at the Par- 
ker House, where Longfellow, Holmes, 
Emerson, Lowell and the other immortals 
resorted for pie and for celestial converse. 
Mr. Longfellow, who was the most gra- 
cious gentleman that ever lived, turned to 
King and asked in regard to Bret Harte — 
" But is he a genius ? " Longfellow pro- 
nounced the word " ge-ni-us," and quietly 
paused for a reply. King said, " Why as 
to that, Mr. Longfellow, everybody knows 
that the country possesses no three-sylla- 
bled genius outside of Massachusetts." 
"Did they laugh?" I asked of King. 
" Not a smile," he said. a But afterwards, 
Dr. Holmes came round during the coffee 
and cigars and pressed my hand quietly and 
told me that that was a good thing I had 
said to Longfellow." 

In this anecdote, we get very near the se- 
cret. Why didn't those gentlemen laugh? 
They were the wittiest set in America, fond 
242 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

of laughing, collected at lunch for the very 
purpose of joking. Yes, but not at them- 
selves; and not in response to the jest of a 
new, raw outsider. Had Dr. Holmes him- 
self made the quip, it would have been re- 
peated all over Boston. But they were not 
prepared to laugh before knowing whether 
Clarence King was a wit. Where was his 
certificate? And who let him in, anyway? 
The great, terrible, important powers of 
the world, like social caste and religious 
domination, always rest on secrets. A man 
is born on the wrong side of the street and 
can therefore never enter into certain draw- 
ing-rooms, even though he be in every way 
superior to everyone in those drawing- 
rooms. When you try to find out what the 
difference is between him and the rest, and 
why he is accursed, you find that the reason 
is a secret. It is a secret that a certain kind 
of straw hat is damnable. Little boys 
know these things about other little boys. 
The world is written over with mysterious 
tramp-languages and symbols of Masonic 
hieroglyphics. I know these things because 
I belong to the Masonic Lodge of Massa- 
chusetts. By the accident of birth I am in- 
side Boston (^Eschylus says that relation- 
ship is a tremendous force) . I am inside of 
243 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

Boston, and I am going to divulge; the 
meaning of every Masonic symbol which. I 
can decipher. 

Boston has always been a hieratic aris- 
tocracy. Its chief rulers were parsons in 
the eighteenth century, and business men in 
the nineteenth. But you may take it for 
granted that there was always a pharisaical 
clique in the middle of Boston, a clique of 
elders. The anthropologists have no doubt 
a name for the gang-instinct and cryptic 
passion that binds thieves together, and fills 
the words " he is one of us " with so much 
religious power. Now, amid all the down- 
fall of Puritanism, and of the old Boston 
cultivation, the inner core of a loyalty to a 
local priesthood still rules the city; and, on 
the whole, rules it well. Social Boston is a 
religious society, so also in business Boston, 
so is sporting Boston, so is literary Boston. 
If you know the town well, you will often 
find persons there who are not of the caste. 
Their countenances do not fall at the men- 
tion of Moses and Aaron, and they wear no 
phylacteries. You will generally find that 
such people are mere sojourners in Boston; 
their fathers and grandfathers came from 
elsewhere. 

One should immerse one's self occasion- 
244 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

ally in some hieratic influence in order to 
understand how vulgar and disgusting any 
merely personal virtue appears in the eyes 
of the faithful. The devout Protestant is, 
to the devout Catholic, a gross and boorish 
person. 

The na'ture of Mrs. Howe's social talents 
was not acceptable to the taste of Boston. 
Her house was full of Persians, Arme- 
nians, and the professors of strange new 
faiths. I think it was her followers rather 
than herself that displeased the Bostonians. # 
She sat at the gate and entertained all men, 
including a lot of people who Boston 
thought ought not to be entertained. But 
there she sat, nevertheless, — all courage, all 
wit and all benignity, and so will the image 
of her ever remain in the minds of the thou- 
sands of those who knew her. 



245 



THE NEGRO QUESTION 



XVII 

THE NEGRO QUESTION 

I come here with some reluctance this even- 
ing; because I do not wish to be obliged to 
make up my mind about the race question. 
In making up one's mind, one closes one's 
mind ; and this race question, — which is no 
more than the struggle between Good and 
Evil put into visible shape, — can only be 
settled from moment to moment by any one 
of us. In so far as we ourselves are per- 
fect, we settle it for the moment. 

The history of the United States down 
to about 1870 is a history of this particular 
struggle between good and evil. Our con- 
stitutional questions, Secession, the Civil 
War, Reconstruction, — all the heat and 
agony of our political life during seventy 
years, came out of this negro question. 
Since 1870, the negro question has ceased 
to be the pivot upon which our whole civili- 
zation turned, and has sunk to the position 
249 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

of being the chief among the great prob- 
lems before us. It is a problem that has 
been clearly recognized and is being nobly 
met by the whites and by the blacks alike. 
Christianity, training, and education — 
these things are the solution, these things 
are the need of all of us. If we keep our 
individual minds clear of all rancor, time 
will do the rest. 

I believe that no race ever had a better 
hero than the colored race has to-day in 
Booker Washington. He is the embodi- 
ment of what all of us ought to be in regard 
to this question : not only the negro but the 
white man looks upon him with reverence, 
and learns from him to be patient, to put 
away animosity, to have faith in God, to 
pursue inflexibly processes which operate 
slowly. 

The two races in America are spiritually 
in contact and can only improve in unison. 
Therefore when an Association of this kind 
is formed for " the advancement of the col- 
ored race," it might just as well be called 
" for the advancement of the white race." 
I suppose that you all understand this. 

There is a great law governing the meet- 
ing of races. When a powerful race meets 
a helpless race, two things happen. First 
250 



THE NEGRO QUESTION 

there is a carnival of crime. Cruelty and 
oppression take place: some men in each 
race become evil and hard-hearted. But 
the reverse also happens thereafter; good- 
ness and mercy are developed: certain men 
become saints and heroes. Now in Amer- 
ica we had two hundred and fifty years of 
the epoch during which both races were be- 
ing injured by contact with one another, 
both were being made miserable, both bru- 
talized, and in consequence of this very 
epoch of slavery our whole land to-day is 
still full of hard, hard hearts. 

But the tide seems now to be running the 
other way, and the pressure created by the 
living together of the two races seems to be 
generating virtue. The educators and mis- 
sionaries, the philanthropists and thinkers 
have sprung up in America and have de- 
voted themselves to the negro question. 
They form a sort of army. There are apos- 
tles and servants of Christ among us who 
have been called into being through this 
very question, and whose existence gives 
dignity to our whole civilization. They 
have not solved the question as yet. The 
depravity of the blacks and the lynchings by 
the whites have not ceased. Burnings of 
negroes at the stake still draw upon our na- 
251 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

tion the contempt and horror of mankind. 
But the spirit that is to put an end to these 
things has already been born. 

True reform comes slowly; and no race 
was ever freed except by its own ef- 
forts, — no man saved except through him- 
self. Therefore, when I hear of the strug- 
gles which the poor negroes are making in 
the South, to civilize and to educate them- 
selves, when I hear of how they eke out il- 
liberal public grants with mites saved out of 
their poverty, of how they are long suffering 
and reasonable, — I say to myself, This was 
worth waiting for. These people are sav- 
ing themselves. They will obtain the 
money which they need, and will use it 
rightly. The same thought is of harder aj>- 
plication to the lynching question. The 
communities where lynching occurs can 
only recover their power of self-govern- 
ment through their own efforts. The 
flower must grow out of the soil. The man 
on the spot who is a part of the community 
where lynching is threatened, must risk his 
life or lay his life down freely in defense of 
law. A mere willingness on the part of 
one man to do this will generally stop a 
lynching. And you will observe that this 
spirit is beginning to manifest itself among 
252 



THE NEGRO QUESTION 

our people, and will end by preventing the 
atrocities. 

I used to bewail the present legacy of the 
Slave-trade as much as the original iniquity 
of it. The fact that the negroes are here 
at all seemed almost to over-punish Amer- 
ica for the crime of their importation. I 
used to think that the consequences which 
that crime entailed in the perpetuation 
among us of passions fierce and base, and 
in the mingling of races that are better 
apart, were pure evils, — ghastly never-end- 
ing punishments. But now I believe that 
it is foolish to argue in such a manner as 
this about historic things. The subject is 
beyond our comprehension. What we 
think the greatest evils in our minute lives 
often bring to us the greatest blessings. It 
may be so with nations. 

The race question certainly puts each of 
us to the alternative of becoming a great 
deal holier, a great deal kinder, a great deal 
deeper in character, or else of being brutal- 
ized to some extent. We have not yet got 
free from some of the intellectual conse- 
quences of slavery. The old cruelty of the 
plantation is gone, and yet I sometimes hear 
rich people in club-rooms arguing about the 
negro question in a spirit, and from a point 
253 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

of view, that indicates an intellectual in- 
jury. My own friends sometimes show 
scars of the mind in dealing with the negro 
question. They become for a moment like 
sixteenth-century pirates, — their eyes glit- 
ter, and they talk tyranny. Yet these men 
are now mere relics. The newer age shows 
ever fewer of the type. Such meetings as 
this show that the American people are 
choosing the upward path. Hardly a day 
passes but we see new proofs that America 
will solve her race question in the only way 
it can be solved, — through herself becom- 
ing more gentle and more intelligent. 

Our progress in this direction is slow; 
the path leads upward at a very small an- 
gle. But let us remember that slowness of 
growth is what America most needs in all 
directions. In everything we have grown 
up too quickly. To-day all things among 
us go crashing forward too quickly. We 
should not desire sudden changes, even for 
the better. Sudden changes signify short- 
lived events. Therefore, if we see steady 
improvement going forward anywhere, let 
us rejoice that it goes forward slowly, so 
that its roots may sink deep, and all nature 
may accommodate herself to the change. 
Thus will the good things become perma- 
nent. 

254 



THE NEGRO QUESTION 

Isaiah says in a text that is too seldom 
quoted : " He that believeth shall not make 
haste." Those words seem to suggest the 
very patience which is the national endow- 
ment of the negro race. We see the virtue 
to-day in the meek and sturdy spirit with 
which the leaders of that race are building 
up schools and sending out missionaries. 
They are men of long wind and great faith. 
They refuse to be drawn into controversy 
or to take part in occasional excitement. 
They realize the nature of their work. 
They have studied their problem with the 
passion of their souls, and they understand 
it. And we, who belong to the white race, 
may herein find our best lesson. We also 
must have long wind and perfect faith. 
We must be as patient, and school ourselves 
as thoroughly as they. 



255 



ALFRED Q. COLLINS 



XVIII 
ALFRED Q. COLLINS 

Alfred Collins was a man of remarkable 
talents, and he belonged by nature to at 
least two of the great spiritual cliques of 
the world. The first of these cliques was a 
worship of intellectual accuracy, and the 
second was a passion for art. He was one 
of the first generation of idealists that arose 
after the Civil War, and through whose la- 
bors new life has been poured into our ar- 
chitecture, politics, charity and education. 
He was to have been the painter of this 
epoch ; as McKim became its architect. He 
was to have filled out the niche of painting 
in the temple of the new idealism. To such 
a destiny, at any rate, we assigned Collins, 
when I first knew him; and although he 
never attained to the rank we dreamed of, 
nevertheless he became one of the most suc- 
cessful portrait painters of his day, and was 
regarded by a circle of contemporary art- 
ists as a high priest of technical endeavor, 
— a spirit of unpurchasable integrity, whose 
work astonished and inspired. His por- 
traits were not numerous, yet he always had 
staunch clients behind him, who were con- 
259 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

vinced of his importance. Their confidence 
was, I believe, largely due to the steady and 
generous admiration of other painters, an 
admiration which was a credit to the times. 

Alfred Collins was a lad without means, 
born in a land which seemed to possess 
neither art nor aspirations for art, whose in- 
habitants would not recognize talent if it 
should appear, and would be apt to discrim- 
inate against their own countrymen when- 
ever this was possible. I knew the genera- 
tion of artists in America to which Collins 
belonged, and, with regard to most of them, 
the struggle always seemed too severe. 
Our public had neither knowledge nor sym- 
pathy, nor money to give to these men. 
They seemed to be drawing upon a vacuum 
in trying to paint at all. Yet there was in 
America, at that time, an undoubted im- 
pulse toward painting, which sent these men 
to France, the art-center of the period. 

Collins started in life as a bank clerk in 
Boston. His mind, however, was as non- 
commercial as if he had always lived in a 
Spanish Convent. His intellectual outlook 
was unblemished. He was sent to study in 
Paris by Mr. Quincy Shaw of Boston. 
Collins and his compatriots arrived in Paris 
during an epoch when the arts were de- 
260 



ALFRED Q. COLLINS 

dining, in fact when the old craftsman's 
formulas were being thrown away, and 
caustic, dissolvent criticism was in the air. 
The pupils in the studios of the great French 
painters were not taught how to paint, so 
much as how to analyze. I met Collins on 
his return from his long apprenticeship in 
Paris, and I sat at his feet for many years, 
listening to the true doctrine; — and yet it 
is only by chance, and a day or two ago, that 
I happened to recollect the very first impres- 
sion I got from him. It was this : — 
" Why didn't they teach him painting in 
Paris ?" I should have thought a man 
would come back from abroad knowing his 
trade. But the truth is that in about 1840 
the whole world forgot the trade of por- 
traiture. To know what that trade once 
was like one must look at the portraits of 
for instance, — Harding, or of any second or 
third rate French or English painter of the 
mid-century, — of some man who earned his 
livelihood by supplying the market with por- 
traits. The man has a style and a recipe. 
He is not very ambitious as to method; he 
does not experiment; he paints. 

But the newer painters sought the higher 
branches, and lost the ABC. A great 
critical world-influence, which began in the 
261 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

eighteenth century, was drawing to a focus 
and strangling art in Paris at the very mo- 
ment when ignorant, enthusiastic young 
America arrived there. Young America 
came away with a mouthful of ashes. We 
arrived just as the feast was over. We 
needed the rudiments and we received the 
leavings. We needed milk and porridge, 
and we received a cup of black coffee and 
a cigarette. 

Collins had a chiseled brow, a straight 
nose and blazing eye and was extraordina- 
rily handsome before he became heavy. At 
the age of twenty-eight, however, when I 
first knew him, he had a chin and a frame 
more suitable to a man of forty than of 
thirty. He was of very powerful build, 
he knew how to box, punch the bag and 
wrestle, and he loved feats of strength in 
the studio. He was a bon vivant, and 
would make a preliminary study for a feast, 
as a painter makes a sketch for a picture. 
He had the subtlety of an animal in under- 
standing character, and he observed delicate 
traits like a criminologist. He was always 
bursting with enthusiasm and gave of him- 
self. He had so much personal force and 
conversational power that to his admirers 

he became a deity, — to those who disliked 
262 



ALFRED Q. COLLINS 

him, an egotistical doctrinaire. His super- 
abundant physical energy became a source 
of weakness, — as happens with many peo- 
ple, who pass through youth without being 
forced to learn the art of resting. He re- 
minded one always of the statue of the 
wrestler, and was prepared to solve all ques- 
tions by wrestling. 

Collins felt he was destined to rediscover 
painting. He was to recover the practices 
of the great masters of Italy and Holland, 
and to justify them by the science of the 
nineteenth century. 

That all good art was based on scientific 
truth, he never doubted. He had the whole- 
hearted belief in psychology, which tinged 
the minds of young men of promise in his 
day. All the new sciences were to bring us 
nearer to all the old arts. Collins would 
spend a month of study over some effect of 
light in Rembrandt, or in seeking the secret 
of a Rubens drapery. He felt that neither 
accident nor ethical intention was behind 
great painting, but only an understanding of 
the laws of vision. Ruskin and the senti- 
mental writers were poison to him. He 
thought that all merit was the result of 
technical excellence, and he regarded the 
moral feelings which art arouses in the lay- 
263 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

man as most dangerous guides to the study 
of painting. 

He read books upon the eye and upon re- 
fractions of light; he experimented with 
colored objects. He often approached the 
subject from the standpoint of a physicist; 
but he was too much of an artist, and his 
interests were too metaphysical for him long 
to remain a physicist. 

In his late years he told me that he had 
started out with a belief in realism. He had 
staked his all upon this. He had clutched 
realism, and held it with might and main in 
his clenched fist, — till at last he began 
gradually to open his hand, and there was 
nothing in it: realism had vanished under 
inspection. Another of his early enthusi- 
asms was for high lights. He would place 
a hard featured old lady under a tremen- 
dous blaze of light, and paint her till the 
values hurt your eyes and hurt your feel- 
ings. If you should suggest that the world 
would never put up with anything so ugly, 
he would smile with commiseration, or else 
roar with anger. He was on the path to- 
wards Leonardo. He cared nothing about 
the old lady, or her family or her well- 
wishers, or about the critics and contem- 
porary mousers in the drawing-room. The 
264 



ALFRED Q. COLLINS 

picture was a mere experiment, a reaction, 
a page in a notebook. 

If Collins had a defect, it was a lack of 
humility. He couldn't bear to think, and 
he wouldn't stop to imagine that perhaps he 
might be altogether on the wrong track 
about something. He never discovered the 
unconscious. To him art was something 
that could be found out. The unity of light 
was a calculated, predetermined thing. 
Sentiment was a danger, temperament was 
a danger, all must be science. So far as 
technical skill went, he always drew like a 
master, and could at times, paint like a 
master. But his search for perfection 
ruined his power to finish. He had no trade 
sense, no sense of the " good enough," no 
conscience as to his duty to provide some- 
thing or other that would pass muster. He 
sought the absolute, and would work for six 
months at a portrait and then abandon it, 
because he could not find a cue which any 
half hour's inspiration might bring. 

His main thesis, and I must say that it 
profoundly affected me at the time he ex- 
pounded it and has influenced all my be- 
liefs ever since, — was that beauty must 
not be sought as an end in itself: beauty 
was a result. You must seek truth. For 
265 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

instance, in writing or in speaking, you 
must always try to give the idea with 
accuracy. If you pursue this course, a 
certain grace will arise out of your suc- 
cess in giving the thought. But you must 
not try to be graceful; or you will become 
affected. He disliked artists who con- 
sciously adopted any style. Style should be 
merely the result of doing one's best with 
the problem. If a thing were perfectly 
painted, it would have no style. Style is 
error, — just as personality is error. 
Nevertheless, the more you avoid the per- 
sonal, the more will the note of personal 
conviction be in your work. By neglecting 
style you attain to style. In all these mat- 
ters Collins was dealing with the most pro- 
found metaphysical truths. 

He was always interested in abstract 
thought; and I cannot but believe that peo- 
ple's influence is in proportion to their power 
of abstract thinking; or at least that some 
very strong wave of force goes out from 
anyone who is excited by abstract ideas. 
Collins' ambition was abstract. He wanted 
to redeliver to mankind the Promethean art 
of painting; and he suffered as much as if 
he had already done this, and were being 
punished by Zeus for it. He had the ob- 
266 



ALFRED Q. COLLINS 

stinate pride, the incorruptibility of a being 
who should propose to be the first man, — 
the one unbought spirit in the universe. 

Under different conditions of education 
and surroundings the vast force that was in 
Collins would have issued in pictures. 
But in spite of his impassioned study and his 
ceaseless experiments, he never perfected his 
vehicle, nor did he ever quite know what he 
wanted to say. There was impediment in his 
thought. He saw much and thought much 
— perhaps he saw and thought too much. 
For some reason, hidden in the very bosom 
of his age and of his country, his mind was 
prone to produce the philosopher's, rather 
than the painter's solution of a problem. 
His talk would connect itself easily with the 
metaphysical discussions of all ages; but, 
so far as painting went, the tradition was 
broken; there was a link gone between his 
work and the old work. 

Thoughts like these would flit through 
my mind as I watched him paint and wished 
I knew enough of the art to understand his 
procedure. Painting itself is a sequent and 
consistent symbolism, that goes back to the 
beginning of time. Any new branch of it is 
deeply connected with the old roots; and 
those souls to whom painting is a natural 
267 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

language have ideas that can be expressed 
only in the terms of that art. When I 
heard this brilliant creature talk, I used to 
think that if he could say it all in paint, he 
would be as great as Velasquez. But he 
had set himself a task that could be accom- 
plished only in a sympathetic age. 

Collins' method of painting gave the in- 
tellect more than it could do. He supposed 
that he must both see and translate upon the 
instant: the values of the sitter must be 
transformed into art then and there. To 
Collins every picture was a new problem, 
as. great as the whole of mathematics. Now 
the great painters have not painted in this 
way. They have dished out a spoonful of 
beaten-up eggs, ready for the fire, added a 
pinch of parsley, and served hot. Each 
one of them had a personal language of his 
own, which he had worked out during his 
whole lifetime, and which answered his 
needs. Collins, on the other hand, was al- 
ways seeking. 

And yet here too we face a sort of 
strange paradox; for in being the thing he 
was, Collins broke barriers and blazed paths 
which required just this kind of a man. 
Society through its opposition compelled 
this form of explosion. 
268 



ALFRED Q. COLLINS 

I am convinced that in some essential way- 
he was on the right track. The art of the 
world is a game of hide and seek. It blos- 
soms, it springs up in nooks and corners, it 
dies away, it reappears. Some men search 
and find it not ; others find and value it not. 
This causeless, impersonal, fanning of the 
spirit into flame, which leaves a picture or a 
sonnet behind it has something to do with 
the technique of craft; but philosophy has 
never been able to discover where craft ends 
and genius begins. The great artist, during 
the great epoch, pursues his work, dies and 
leaves the matter a mystery, — over which 
the artists, amateurs and thinkers of later 
times grope, probe and experiment. 

A renaissance almost always begins in 
an attempt to recover lost arts. New art 
grows out of old art, as a graft on an old 
stock. The forms, to be sure, change under 
the hand of the master. Orpheus takes up 
Pan's pipes, and they are transformed into 
an organ under his touch. 

There was some sort of buzzing gadfly 
of destiny behind Collins that awakened 
many other persons besides myself to a con- 
ception of what painting is. He taught us 
that painting was filled with a force like the 
sun, that it was intelligent, articulated, 
269 



MEMORIES AND MILESTONES 

freighted with indestructible meaning, and 
was one of the things of greatest conse- 
quence in the world. I could not myself 
read these beliefs in Collins' paintings; but 
the effect that his work and even fragments 
of it, often had upon painters made me see 
that somehow the beliefs must be expressed 
there for those who could read. 



THE END 



270 



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